I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
I noticed that I'm no longer reading an article, blog post, etc. I just scroll through it and close the page. It' really very rare that I spend time on some blog post, but I do read books, and I do it more than ever.
Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Are the books gaining popularity again? What are your thoughts?
299 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadIt's personally been quite effective, albeit very simple.
Funnily enough, I just finished a book without replacing it and I'm straight back on the phone :)
Anyone else try this?
Blogs are easier to consume, but obviously you cannot expect every author (especially the tecnnical ones) to be a proficient and solid writer or to have paid editors and reviewers.
The problem with many books is that you realize they are crap halfway through the investment. The investment for blogs is much smaller.
Compared to a few years ago, I don't remotely have the same enthusiasm I could have for blogposts, and on the contrary I often find the writing style to be irritating -- especially hyperlinks-rich ones, which break the flow of thought, like internalized distractions. Yet I've also started to write my own blogposts because there are some ideas that I wanted to express in that form and did not find on the internet.
My guess, based on my own experience: you have reaped what you could from the ideas that can conveniently be expressed in blogposts, and it would be very hard to find new ones that would enrich your worldview. You have to go deeper, thus find the format that is more suitable for this.
Sometimes you'll find an article that is as good as a book but other times I read a book proceeding an article and then wish the author would have started by reading some books themselves.
I find other long form content like podcasts or filmed presentations can sometimes hit that quality mark of books too.
Articles / tweets are good for learning the name of a concept I've never heard of.
Books / podcasts / YouTube are a good way to deep dive on the actual concept itself.
There's very little about a book that's innate, rather, conventions from size to font to structure and organisation, contents, indices, notes, pagination for eff's sake, all had to be arrived at and designed.
That's happened over centuries, and represents a great deal of embedded wisdom.
I become painfully aware of this when reading online, whether on desktop (can be OK with a suitably large screen), laptop (horrible), OLED tablet (OK, but not great), or e-ink device (far better, though still has limitations).
A book's robustness, persistence, and flexibility of access are hard to match. Digital gives options for search, access, and automation, which can be handy.
What most plagues online book formats, I'm concluding after using an e-ink device for nearly two years, is displays. Emissive, low-resolution, wrong format, and difficulty in reading under bright illumination. E-ink addresses most of these (at sufficient size: 8" minimum, 10" or 13" is preferable for detailed works).
That still leaves a lot to the specific technical format and typography of individual e-books, and there are designs which work better than others.
There's also the mechanics of ebook reader software, most especially of navigation and annotation. The directness of physical objects (leafing or flipping through pages, scribbling a quick note in pencil or pen, dog-earing, physical bookmarks) is lost, though good designs can come reasonably close.
(I'm trying to find a book on, erm, The Book, which I'd found and believe is somewhere in my (electronic) collection, though it's been eluding me for the past quarter hour or so.)
Edit: Found it. Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016)
<https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393244793>
<https://archive.org/details/bookcovertocover0000hous>
<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=5D3A0B91464FE40568F5BBA...>
<https://www.worldcat.org/title/956980330>
Not without some irony, a book which is far better in print or PDF than ePub format.
But… Apart from being nice to look at, a (very big) bookshelf is such a waste of space I wish there where something in between a real book and an ebook.
One of my favourite illustrations is that of the Central Social Institution of Prague. From photos of it, you'll understand where Futurama got its flying desks from:
<https://www.vintag.es/2020/01/central-social-institution-pra...>
I've guestimated the total possible data storage capacity at about 500 GB, with a likely achieved storage of far less, probably more on the order of 25 GB. You could tuck the whole archive into a microSD card on your mobile phone or tablet.
Some discussion here:
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/108388654028938414>
The problem with digital archives is discoverability and browseability. Shelf-scanning books in a good library really is a pleasure, though there are alternatives in the digital world, mostly involving traversing bibliographies, references, and citations. Not the same, but similar.
There's also the Star Trek convention of electronic documents being bound to a specific tablet or reader, rather than being data beamed or transmitted between devices. Yet another case of visual storytelling trumping technical rigour, though it has a certain charm.
The brutalism of a large array of bound books is appealing, but particularly hard to accomplish with digital systems, though some sort of digital signage showing a sampling or overview of a collection might offer some visibility.
I've recently made the acquaintance of Bill Janssen, retired from Xerox PARC, who worked on their digital library management tools in the 1990s and aughts:
<https://www.parc.com/technical-publications/uplib-a-universa...>
Fediverse thread: <https://writing.exchange/@billjanssen/109321080797522794>
On my tablet / e-reader, I've collected a number of images of libraries, including one that seems to have roughly as many books visible as I have on my device (roughly 10,000). Just as a sort of visual contextualisation.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/style/richard-macksey-lib...>
<https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/01/16/fashion/VIRAL-LIB...>
It shows the home library of Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey in Baltimore. The full collection size of 51,000 volumes would be somewhat more, I estimate about 10,000 are visible in the image as composed.
To a rough approximation, that image shows the number of documents that fit on my e-book reader.
Employee blog posts from Big Tech now push the corporate agenda. Stepping out of line "has consequences", so no one speaks freely any more.
Self employed people are afraid of being crushed by Big Tech if they dissent. The result are blogs that are as interesting as reading the Pravda.
Purely technical blogs got unfocused in presentation, are largely self-promotional and rarely address interesting subjects.
I've definitely migrated back to reading mostly books and long-form articles. I'm even considering, for the first time in my life, on paying for subscriptions of reputable newspapers and cut that off from my internet usage. It's getting too far into overwhelming territory to keep up, maybe it's my age showing making me very tired of the pull-model for consumption of news/content... I want something curated, well written and with interesting points, anything else feels like a waste of time.
"Ask HN: Relatively less known but good blogs?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258458 (6 points, 5 comments)
It did not get the number of responses I hoped for. But as a rule I avoid anything coming from mass blogging platforms like medium, substack, devto and similar sites. They may occasionally have good articles but most of the articles from these sites are poor and self-promotional. I would love to find a directory or search engine where I can search for good blogs maintained on independent websites by independent people.
I did another Ask HN now to collect links to some good articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310222
Blog posts are another thing where there are many, many, many of them available, but basically zero reviews and recomendations from friends, and maybe, sometimes you get some quality-indicator if it's reposted here or on reddit and you see the upvote ratio... otherwise you never know what you'll going to get.
So, as with books, you read the first paragraph, sometimes you stop reading there, sometimes you scroll down and "read" vertically while scrolling (just looking at text to see if it contains something interesting) and many times it doesn't, so when you scroll to the bottom after 7 seconds of scrolling, you just close it and move on.
I don't see why this is a bad thing.
Some bloggers have gone to SEO optizimation schemes (as with recipes, where instead of a recipe, you get the authors childhood story first, then his family situation, what s/he likes to do on saturdays, etc..), some keep it short, some insert unneeded politcs everywhere, and some also manage to write something interesting and readable to the end. If you started reading books so often and unselectively as you do blogposts, you'd stop reading a lot more books too.
What I don't enjoy - and have quickly learned to avoid - is this certain type of non-fiction book that ought to be an article or blog post. They're easy to find now, they're usually just shy of or right at 300 pages, they have a catchy core idea and they tend to expound on that idea about as much as a blog post would. The rest is just there to service the notion of having a book. Ugh. They were I think a bigger problem 3-4 years ago, but maybe that's because I've gotten better at avoiding them.
Which raises two caveats:
1. This isn't uniformly the case, and there is in fact excellent writing in all formats, though I would suggest it's getting harder to find especially by way of keyword / content-based Web search (as opposed to searching by specific title, author, or organisation).
2. There's a heck of a lot of nostalgia, survivorship, and other bias at play here. There are a great many badly-written old books and articles as well. We tend to remember the ones that are in fact good, and those also tend to be the ones most recommended. I'm struck by how old the works on curated lists of best books (fiction or nonfiction) are, especially in light of how vastly more works have been published in the 20th and 21st centuries relative to all prior time.
So, yes, there are a lot of overly-padded books which are really pretentious magazine articles, and much poorly-written copy in news and magazine stories as well. I definitely notice this and try to turn away from the form when I realise I'm reading it.
(The assessment cost of determining whether or not a text is worth reading is among the nonrecoverable costs of an overactive reading habit.) I read enough older news and magazine copy to feel reasonably confident that the problem isn't entirely in my head: writing, even within the same publications or classes of works, seems to be getting worse, with efforts to precisely attribute every last statement or source being one notable part of that within news pieces.)
That said, I too have been tending strongly toward books and more-traditional print sources (journals, magazines) than online media. The problem with the latter is that the early promise of removed editorial gatekeepers has evolved toward its rather predictable end-state: the slush pile has migrated from the editor's desk to our browser and smartphone, and we're left with the challenge of wading through dreck in search of rare gems.
It's also hard to avoid the allure of novelty and mystery. I keep having to remind myself that the odds of the best or most relevant works of all time having been written within the past 24 hours are low at best. And without unnecessarily reifying the past, there's a lot of wisdom in old works, as well as the benefit that any pressing alternate incentives for publication are now largely stripped of their manipulative capabilities. Even reading old magazines and newspapers, the advertising tends to feel quaint or charming rather than urgent. This holds even when reading works I had read at the time a decade or four ago, suggesting it's less the advertising itself than the liveness of the attempted ad-verting of my attention that's salient.
I also am finding myself relying far more on bibliographic rather than Web search to turn up materials. Not exclusively, and HN itself plays a large role. But when I find a work referenced elsewhere --- whether in an HN comment, as a podcast comment or show note, or as a mention, citation, or note in a book or paper --- those referenced works tend to have far more salience than what Google or DDG-fronted Bing suggest to me.
(I've serious regrets that Worldcat, the only global Union Catalogue I'm aware of, seems to have, seems to have gone Full Spyware: <https://twitter.com/libraryprivacy/status/157018300668967322...>. Library catalogues are otherwise generally excellent guides. I may simply have to start using university or large-public-library search tools directly.)
To me it sounds like you are bored or tired of reading about the same material. It's burnout really. It might be the simple that there isn't much new or interesting material in your area of interest and most blog posts are rehashing the same info you already know.
Taking a break is fine. Maybe its time to explore hobbies you've been interested in perusing but have not yet had the time.
The day after stable diffusion appeared people were already blogging about it, long form writing can never be that fast…
Even worse, blogs often are the only free source of insight, with books and papers locked behind paywalls.
You need to write one blog post a week, minimum. Three a week, daily even. For years and decades. If you don't regularly publish a new post, your blog withers, and if you stop entirely, your blog dies.
It's hard to have that many new things to say, let alone things of value.
There's a lot of incentive to bump up the number of pages, so most of the time when I pick up a non-fiction book I end up regretting it and shouting into the void this could've been a blog post. Even in decently edited books I always feel like they could've been cut by at least 50 pages without losing any of the substance, but I guess nobody wants to publish a book under 200 pages.
Good articles are not easy to come by, but I never run out of them. The best ones are usually in the range of 30 min - 1 hour to consume, all of which could have easily been padded with fluff into a ~250 pages book, but they weren't and I appreciate that.
That isn't to say I don't read books, but about 90% of them are fiction noawadays. And I do mean read them, as I find that much more engaging than audiobooks (my mind drifts away, I lose the plot often). Good fictions are easy to find, much easier than say TV shows which take longer to consume, or worse get cancelled after a season or two without a satisfying end.
I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an actual blog post.
Tutorials are probably the most information dense things these days. Followed by podcasts, although the content marketers are actively trying to corrupt that medium.
Most of the time, it's clear that there's not much more in the book.
Brett, the interviewer, seems to be very well prepared for the questions and the conversation has always a good pace with every episode mostly under 50 minutes.
[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/podcast/
The first does a lot of research for every episode, and the second has ~30 years of knowledge about markets, trading, and goes into such depth in his episodes that it's hard to find equivalent level information elsewhere.
I also subscribed to Real Vision at some point, but I find that I simply don't have enough time to utilize all of the resources on there. One episode per week for each of the podcasts below is manageable though - to keep yourself up to date.
https://hiddenforces.io/
https://www.grant-williams.com/grant-williams-podcast/
Pass.
In circus, I had to travel to specific cities and work with specific coaches and pay them quite a premium to get access to the information that they knew - there is literally no alternative once you get to a high enough level.
My thoughts on the finance and geopolitics space is that there are some alternatives to the podcasts listed here, but they are really hard to find and aggregate and sort through all of the noise out there. I consider that a valuable enough service that I'm willing to pay and subscribe to the podcasts. I was also previously a subscriber to Lyn Alden's premium research service.
I like hearing what smart people have to say and I don't subscribe for "stock picks", so I'm not sure exactly why you would call this grift. It is a research service and almost like an auditory journal (is the Economist a grift too? the Financial Times?)
It relies on what articles particularily. There was an article about the advancement of AI in China after chinese researchers build a langage model able to produce some poetry in chinese. Since that model was build 1 1/2 years after an equivalent model in english by us computer engineers, the author of the article concluded China was far behind in matter of AI developement and there was nothing to be afraid of... What ???
No related to financial press chanel, I have just watched a documentary comparing development of big chains of grocery stores in the EU (carrefour, intermarche, and so on), US (amazon fresh), and some large Chinese grocery stores chain (with its vertical integration). The chinese stores chain is clearly ahead of amazon fresh, which is itself clearly ahead of EU stores. In China, AI is everywhere in the supply chain, from automatic surveillance (camera and microphone) of pigs elevage to detect disease at very early sign, to automatic delivery through self-driving car. Everywhere were they can save a buck or reduce production cost.
> Financial Times
Financial Times produced a ton of articles about crypto, and I would be very curious to knows what were their incentives for a big chunk of them... 'Lunch with ~Ponzi~ SBF' is still a subject of ridicule amongst it readers.
Beside, I buy sometimes the paper version, and once I encoutered a tiny ad about a business with no name active in 30 countries looking for partners with a gmail address for contact... Did it sound legit to the guy who accepted to put the ad in the printed version ?
I learned about a simple way to improve my balance on the last episode I listened to: stand on one foot while brushing your teeth. Is this manly? I'm not sure.
I had to take copious notes to make sense of the mass of information, to organize it in a way that my brain could take in, and to glean the facts needed for my research papers.
In some cases, I had to dispute the historian's arguments, which required even more concentration to get inside the head of a scholar who was backing up their statements with 20-30 years or more of research and learning.
That's what I think of as real writing! Then we have fiction (fantasy and science fiction have always been my preferences) that allows us to lose ourselves in a brilliantly described world created by an incredible imagination and lovingly crafted.
Modern writing... yeah, not quite as seductive, though once in a while one can find some very interesting stuff on substack or medium (or here on HN for that matter). There's always more to learn.
Funny you should say that. I can't bring myself to listen to any because of all of the filler and gimmicks.
I got a subscription to Blinkist this year and use these ~20min audio summaries to determine if I think it is worth slogging through the whole book for more detail. It rarely is with modern non-fiction. I read most non-fiction to absorb information and learn new ideas, not for the joy of reading - that's what fiction is for. Of course the genre of non-fiction book is usually indicative of how much it is full of blaa blaa anecdotes, etc. Blinkist is at its best when listening to self improvement for example.
I haven't gone back to blinkist to try this but I think a way to build up semantic memory with blinkist would be listening to every single title in a specific category to go really deep on that one category. At that point you're doing the equivalent of reading a full length non-fiction book anyway, so you haven't saved time, but at least you could triangulate what the core ideas / themes are through the entire category and really get the lay of the land whilst also getting the core messages deeply ingrained.
I feel like this is very true for topics that are extremely shallow, like programming language frameworks.
Otherwise, I find that a good non-fiction book has no equal when it comes to transferring a nuanced mindset or base understanding from the author to the audience.
A tutorial is nice for what it is, a way to quickly become a beginner. Books at their best can give you so much context around they how and why that is very difficult to build by scouring the web for short form content.
I do agree, though, that bad books are insidious time wasters. I've had to find ways to quickly identify if I'm reading one of those, and I apply that process any time I start a big book (I also tend to search out opinions on good books from others before I ever have the book in my hands).
1) Check user reviews for complaints of repetition
2) Read the Table of Contents. If the chapter titles seem more "narrative" (e.g. The Man that Couldn't Tell a Lie..) I expect the kind of fluff I see on social media.
3) Read a chapter towards the middle or end of a book and see if it is building on prior concepts or just rehashing them and presenting new, potentially irrelevant information.
I'd argue that the framework in question matters a lot. If you could link me to a blog post to get me up and running on Rails, I'd ask for a link (seriously, would be interested).
For vast frameworks like that, I think a book could be very beneficial. "Getting Started" sections can focus too much on streamlined starts when (at least personally) I'd love to dive into how the ORM works for more complex joins instead of just a single "get all" query for a single table.
I agree that books like 'Spring in Action' are extremely beneficial, but I also think that the real benefit for me has been in understanding the nuance and context, not an exhaustive covering of details.
I've given up reading plenty of books that are really just reference manuals.
You have to watch out for the ones who want to start a business or a cult, but it will be something like "Check out my new system of psycho-cyber-kinetics" and it's just "be kind to people." I imagine a lot of people wouldn't be into this but I love it.
If you've seen the show Severance, the for now imaginary "The You you are" would be a perfect example of this (and I'm hoping they really write it.)
It's not so much for the quality of the content, but for the...feel?
edit:
The more I think about it, I'm realizing I probably do this as an antidote to social media? Social media being "quick, not very thoughtful, hot takes, often unkind" and the above is the opposite?
It does convey an interesting idea though -- that if you knew nothing of the real world, even something written by that benevolent doofus brother-in-law would be emotionally impactful. I think I get what you mean by genuine authors.
What makes such a nonfiction book different from a fiction book, which is usually just a bag of tropes?
(One trick here is to buy short/small non-fiction books.)
Looking at books to use in class, I'm constantly surprised at how many words they use to convey so few concepts. Teaching is an optimization problem, and if you're optimizing for something else (e.g. making money), the teaching is likely to suffer.
For that reason, you're right on about distrusting blog posts. A lot of them are written in order to make money. Sometimes they also teach.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting paid for your work. I've made a great deal of capitalist money doing various things. But I also believe that I should make my money doing something else, and use that to fund the information-sharing portion of my life.
When it comes to teaching, I don't demand anything from my students or readers. At least not directly--students still pay tuition, and some of that goes to me. But all the ebooks and materials I write are free to use and have no ads and no tracking. The only goal is to teach as efficiently as possible, and no have money enter the picture.
Again, if one wants to make money with your blog or videos or whatever, I'm not judging. My personal ethic prohibits it for me, but of course people are free to do what they want. I just tend to value sites without advertising more than those with.
So I guess I am judging. :)
Regarding making money, I've found at least one way that I think aligns the different needs - some of the videos on my youtube channel are book reviews and summaries of books I've genuinely enjoyed and find worth recommending. Easy way to put an affiliate link in front of people who'd appreciate it, and it's not enough of a concern for me that I'd ever be tempted to recommend a book I didn't personally love just to create content.
Re optimization, imagine an instructional book on any particular topic, and the publisher decides that to maximize revenue, the book must be 350 pages. But the topic can be concisely and effectively covered in 150 pages. So the author pads the content with unrelated topics and verbosity. It's now an inefficient way to learn the material. It could be optimized by bringing it to 150 pages.
But is that all? Is there some way to get the same amount of learning done in 100 pages? In 50 pages?
I have a 20 page powerpoint presentation. Is that the best way of getting this information across? Could I craft a three sentence problem prompt, split the class into teams, and have them learn more in less time?
Stuff like that.
Totally agree with you on this. Best example of this is much hyped "Atomic Habits". I appreciate this book's ideas, and have huge respect for the author.
Articles are easy to produce and publish, there's no review and often are just another way to do self/brand promoting without real content. Good blogs are difficult to spot and to keep track. At the same time articles can give you the sense of a trend and what people are thinking, and the point of view of a niche of people.
So to give a time-quality ratio; socials < blogs/articles < books
This is a very low bar. Lower than having a podcast fact checked on NPR or a research paper on peer reviewed publication.
Think business books, biographies, testimonies of popular events, self help and diet books. The bar to pass is not if it´s remotely true or helpful, it will be if it sells. Review and edition will be on the style and writing, not on content.
Sometimes the authorś name or the press campaign surrounding the book will be enough for it to sell, with very few people actually engaging with the book in its details.
There is a funny and absolutely _not_ reviewed podcast on this theme, openly biased and not to take too seriously, but going through widely popular books that are garbage under even the minimum scrutiny: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...
I actually read a lot LESS books than I used to. I was an avid book reader; but several things happened: 1. My time is significantly reduced by being a 43year old with kids, work, house, mortgage 2. I've read a lot, so it's.... harder to find a new idea in a book, that interests me, especially one that's worth a few hundred pages or rather has hundreds of pages of (to me) new/interesting stuff. Basically, my attention span / my ability to devote dozen hours / the value I need to extract out of each our has changed.
I agree that there's a lot of useless posts; they've been increasing in ratio for years; and now with AI I'm sure they'll increase that much more. But individuals (and even teams) who produce quality content still exist. Heck, it's not a blog, but I've literally just discovered Tom Scott on Youtube - how did I miss that for the last 5-8 years?? I'm sure there are equally great bloggers out there I've clueless of. There's definitely opportunities in helping us identify them.
Fewer.
- Stannis Baratheon
(I’m not actually a grammar nazi, I just can’t resist the joke.)
I was talking to my wife about the show and had the (somewhat obvious in retrospect) realization that I was hesitant to watch HotD because of how horrible GoT mangled the story. The best seasons of Thrones were the seasons which closely followed the books - around season 5 the series really started to go off the rails. It was still fun to watch, but lost some of the initial magic as soon as it didn't have the books to use as a plot template. And by the time it made its way to the final two seasons, it was pretty clear that there was going to be no righting of the ship in the amount of time they had left.
Even with that being the case, it was absolutely impressive how badly they managed to flop the landing of the series. The last season was wildly disappointing to me. And in fact, I think the TV series poisoned my love of the books to some degree. I'm pretty skeptical that GRRM will ever finish and some of the plot points of the end of the TV series seem so wrongheaded to me that I'm not sure how George could ever land the books more successfully.
HotD has been entertaining enough so far, although a bit slow for my taste. We'll have to see how things shake out over the next few years, but at least now my expectations are pretty level.
In a traditional story a happy ending is satisfying because it fulfils expectations, but in A Song of Ice and Fire the 'happy' ending manages to leave the viewer hanging because it breaks the implicit promise of the first few seasons. I fully expected (and wanted) the series to end with the last human dying as the dragons face off against the White Walkers.