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A Man Who Reads Books for a Living
- rickcarlino 5mo agoThis is true for freelance technical editors, too.
- oinoom 5mo agoI started to find this article interesting but every time I tapped “x” on an ad to dismiss it, no more than five seconds later, the same ad would appear at the bottom and distract me. Over and over.
- asdff 5mo agoThe internet is so much better blocking ads.
- ASalazarMX 5mo agoIf someone has the will to fight those little xs, they have the will to install uBlock Origin. It even works on iPad and iPhone now, through a regular Safari Plugin.
- dieselgate 5mo agoAll my xs live in Texas.... and uBlock Origin even works on my locked down work Dell with firefox!
- readthenotes1 5mo agoSo you're saying your PC is in Tennessee? Or is that just your VPN?
- goodmythical 5mo agoArchive.org has a few copies: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://lithub.com/the-man-who-reads-books-for-a-living-one-every-two-days/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://lithub.c...
- bsammon 5mo agosorta piling on here, but it's also worth noting that this problem goes away (and the article is quite readable) in a browser with javascript turned off (and no adblocker).
- criddell 5mo agoI often use reader mode.
- slwvx 5mo agoSounds like a "dickover", a term coined by John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
- sharkjacobs 5mo ago> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
- dylan604 5mo agoFrom studio output, it feels like all they read are graphic novels
- ASalazarMX 5mo agoI was skeptical, but the article starts with Train Dreams, which according to HowLongToRead, would take 2 hours at 300 WPM. https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books. On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read. https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word. https://speedreadr.com/es/ https://speedreadr.com/es/
- daveshistory 5mo agoI'm curious what these tests are measuring if you say your reading comprehension is only 50%. Your comment here is completely articulate and sensible so you are obviously fluent in English. Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
- ASalazarMX 5mo agoIt hurts, doesn't it? I also thought a few measly questions would be a piece of cake, and mainly focused on speed.
- david927 5mo agoI had a good friend who did this -- was a reader for a movie studio, looking for adaptations. Everyone teased him for having such a great job.
- TylerE 5mo agoI kinda feel that's like "video game tester". Sounds great from the outside, but I bet he spent 90% of time reading absolute dreck.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agothe worst part isn't even the garbage, it's the "good plot written in very bad way" you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ginko 5mo agoGood plot / bad writing seems like a good fit for a film adaption if you get the right director.
- cestith 5mo agoEven a better fit with a really good screenwriter.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agothat's like saying remakes are a good fit for bad films maybe it's true - but it doesn't happen
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoAnd yet, it's not unusual that a poorly written book gets a decent movie adaptation. Sometimes it's not even a good plot OR well written, sometimes a book is just popular and the execs cash in on its popularity. I'm thinking things like Da Vinci Code, 50 shades, Twilight, neither of which (the books) are particularly good or tasteful or whatever, but they were very popular, appealing to people who normally don't read books.
- anoncow 5mo agoWith exceptions, after sometime everything can bring you down or nothing can bring you down.
- nephihaha 5mo agoI would imagine this sucks the fun out of some books and also forces you to read a lot of dreadful books. I knew a bibliophile who worked for a publisher and was sad to hear from him that he rarely got time to read for pleasure.
- ASalazarMX 5mo agoIsn't this a work-life balance issue? I work 8 hours a day on my work computer(s), yet I'm still eager to use my home computer for hobbies or pleasure. This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
- nephihaha 5mo agoThis conversation was many, many years ago, but I think his point was that when he got home he didn't want to do any more reading. I have proof read etc and it is a very different type of reading from reading for pleasure. I think when you've been looking at text all day you might want to do something different. Like I say, the man in the article must have to read some horrible books. What happens when there is a book which is horribly written, but which might make a good film. I think that is a genuine scenario.
- foo-bar-baz529 5mo agoThis seems like the kind of profession that AI would’ve already destroyed. Aren’t LLMs pretty good at what he’s doing?
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5mo agoCan't be any worse than what Hollywood puts out already.
- michaelsbradley 5mo agoReminded me a bit of the man who 100-percents (completes all achievements) and reviews video games for a living, usually a couple per week but it varies by time of year and industry cycles: https://youtube.com/@mortismalgaming https://youtube.com/@mortismalgaming
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThis is LLM territory and they are extremely good at it.
- devilsdata 5mo agoFor executives looking to impress? Not really. Being able to rattle off perspective on a book, curated by someone with very high media literacy would signal the same level of media literacy to their audience. An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books. Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThere really isn’t anymore. It can ape anyone’s style well, including insights and almost no one can reliably tell if something is AI or not.
- saltcured 5mo agoIt's a fascinating question. I took the GPP as "media literacy" as more of an elite culture shibboleth. Making the right references in this sort of elitist signalling process is more about showing alignment to your contemporaries. It is just as much making the right references and omitting other references. Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus. An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.
- seabombs 5mo agoBoring isn't it? Reading half a book every single day. Not for him though, he loves it.
- garciasn 5mo agoTIL I can get paid for doing what I do for fun: reading ~100 books a year. What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
- nomadiccoder 5mo ago> even allowing for time off, that works out to roughly 300 books a year, or well over 6,000 across two decades. And that is just the professional tally.
- garciasn 5mo agoEvery other day is ~3/week which is between 150 and 180/year; not 300. He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
- nomadiccoder 5mo agoim just quoting the article
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day. Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
- garciasn 5mo agoAh; that makes more sense. Thank you kind HNer.
- deepsun 5mo agoDon't make a work off your hobby, you'll stop loving that. "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
- killbot5000 5mo agoHow does he stay awake??
- mncharity 5mo ago"I read books [...] I've read a couple of books a week for [...] 50 [years]"[1] - Jim Keller (CPU designer) with Lex Fridman. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5039s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5039s
- __patchbit__ 5mo agoHow does a Nokia snake game decide a path through ALL the books as if an intellectual stream of consciousness in AI core unsupported by runtime or operating system, contained in a portable cartridge smartphone form factor that mounts on humanoid or any other embodiment, where each book is a signed distance field to concentric open unit balls and at any point is a three way split projection to a triangle surface into the mathsemantic field or manifold, etc? imagine a bare metal self programming LISP that has journeyed 20 thousand years in the Asimov positronic brain construction.
- zabzonk 5mo agoI was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
- knocte 5mo ago> and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today. Because you're addicted to HN now and HN didn't exist by then?
- zabzonk 5mo agoI don't spend anywhere near the time on HN today that I used to spend reading books back then.
- luqtas 5mo agohow scary is the decay of cognition? i'm 29 and i already noticed the amount of energy i had on my early 20s on everything, stamina to read, watch movies, exercise, recover from the exercise etc. compared to what i have now. guess it's a slow downhill till i mature to old age but still. shit. i hate the linear time
- zabzonk 5mo agoI find it a bit scary too - I simply cannot write programs anymore (mostly motivation, I think) though I'm not conscious of decay in my other mental functions. But I suppose those poor people that go wandering off into the night would say the same sort of thing.
- Jean-Papoulos 5mo agoSo you think that it's mostly a lack of general "stamina" for actually doing things, over the lessening of abilities to do things ?
- mrandish 5mo agoTo me the interesting question about a job like this is "How can you tell if you're doing it well?" It involves such high-stakes, high-uncertainty and highly variability that it has to be nearly impossible to know. I mean you're predicting distant outcomes from creative pursuits which must first survive a gauntlet of wicked complexity and randomness. Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right. While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
- dhdaadhd 5mo agoPlease tell more!
- mrandish 5mo agoNot sure what you want to know. To me, the interesting aspect is the unique challenges of making high-stakes decisions in ultra high-uncertainty situations where you never receive any feedback signal on most of your calls. And the little you do get is greatly delayed or buried in ambient noise. Yet, due to the size of the infrequent prize, the game can still be worth playing... if you can find and hold a slight edge. There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward. With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players. As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.
- yankee_dodge 5mo agoRobert Redford's character in _Three Days of the Condor_ gets asked what he does for a living. "I read." Has always seemed to be the ideal job. :-)
- Slow_Hand 5mo agoYou mean the job where his entire department was murdered?
- yankee_dodge 5mo agoBut the reader escaped! :-)
- mrkstu 5mo agoI read two books a day in middle school. Still my favorite time to look back on…
- ourmandave 5mo agoI wonder how he felt about holiday vacation book report assignments back in school.
- gobins 5mo agoOn a similar note, I have friends who watches TV Series and Movies before they come out to create/review the subtitles. Sounds like fun job but gets boring really fast.
- adammarples 5mo agoCan you tell him to stop eliding words and paraphrasing that would be great. Also [speaks French] instead of translating or giving French subtitles.
- zem 5mo agoI always think of the twain quote: There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign. -- Mark Twain
- keiferski 5mo agoThis is my retirement plan in circa 40 years from now: own a small bookshop/cafe and sit around reading a book all day. Without the pressure of reviews or deadlines.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoWhy wait until then? Who knows if you'll even be alive in 40 years? :) Not to sound macabre, but it always strikes me as weird to wait until retirement to do something that we think would be the most fulfilling to us. If this is truly something you want and look forward to, wouldn't you want to spend 40 years doing that now, rather than doing that for ~5-10 years 40 years from now?
- keiferski 5mo agoWell because it’s not something I want to do now. Plenty of other bigger dreams in the meantime. The retirement plan of sitting at a cafe with a book is more for when I’ve already done all the other things. I wouldn’t say it’s my ultimate life dream or anything.
- infoinlet 5mo ago[flagged]