There are other ways to learn besides reading books, and it's probably my least preferred method. They often contain a lot of redundant/useless information.
I think you are fooled by the general societal perception that reading makes you smart. This originates from a time when books were expensive and most people couldn't read without paying for private school which made reading the exclusive pursuit of the rich and educated. This is no longer the case. The truth of the matter is that a book is simply one way among many of presenting information. If a person spends 9 hours reading a fiction book for entertainment, they are not substantially better off in life than someone who spent that same time playing video games.
What do you mean? What makes a book more thought provoking than video games? Disclaimer: I do not play videos games. I just don't enjoy them. I'm not in defence of them. I'm just thought-provoked about why you think video games are essentially less then books.
Writing is literally the conveyance of thought itself, and nothing else.
A picture of a rock might or might not provoke any particular thoughts about rocks in the viewer.
But if I write anything more than the purely descriptive "there is a rock" then I have conveyed some sort of thought about the rock or rocks in general, and at the very least you have been introduced to my thought, and very likely you have also reacted with some thought of your own. And the mechanical process of reading gave you the time and venue for that to happen.
Even if I do try to be purely descriptive, it's impossible to seperate my perception from the output. I can only describe what I noticed and considered noteworthy. I litetally cannot write the equivalent of a photograph of a rock, but can only write my thoughts about that rock.
The photograph may contain more data, but no opinions and no understandings. The viewer can possibly have no thoughts at all about it, and not actively notice most of the data, or the significance of various bits of the data, but the reader must have at the very least the thoughts of the writer, and it will be almost impossible not to have some sort of thougts of their own in reaction to reading the writers.
Other things also provoke thought, including video games. But I only asserted "more".
I said nothing that proves I don't or didn't think about games. That is pure fabricated assumption.
It is a contrived exception because you have to pick a special video game and a special book to make it work, and the example will not hold when picking 100 books at random and 100 games at random, and that's even granting that the cherry picked example even holds, which I actually deny.
Just because you choose not to think about games doesn't mean they don't provoke thought. There are many people who read books such as "50 Shades of Grey" and don't think very much about them at all. Indeed you can think equally about a video game as you could some fiction book. They are likely intellectual objects of similar complexity. A book can, however, provide useful information. I assert this is the benefit that a book has over a game. You can think about either as much or little as you want, but the benefit of a book comes from the information therein and not from some kind of abstract mental exercise involved in the process of reading.
The tone of your post suggests you're refuting this wholesale. I think you're wrong, reading books makes you smart(er) at least by expanding your vocabulary and widening your understanding of the world by putting in front of you experiences from people that are not exactly like you.
You're offering video games as an alternative, but people that invest a lot of time in playing video games as opposed to reading, usually do it with terrible games, where the lesson to learn is that life is expendable, enemies must be stopped at all costs, genocide is valid as long as you're the main character, etc. Games as art form rarely engage people in the same way as mass murder types of games. What are the sales numbers of Disco Elysium vs Call of Duty?
And yes, pulp exists in writing too, probably to an even greater extent, but at the same time the peaks are higher and, in my opinion, the benefits, as subjective as they may be, greater.
> where the lesson to learn is that life is expendable, enemies must be stopped at all costs, genocide is valid as long as you're the main character, etc
You make an almost credible post but then totally undermine it with this statement. It's rather like saying Looney Tunes is bad because the intended lesson is that you should set your cat on fire.
Maybe you're right, but if you see no connection between the trivialization of violence and murder (that most media, not just games is pushing) and the attitude society has to the same violence I feel like maybe we're living in different worlds.
My problem is not that games make kids shoot schools, is with the fact that games in order to "be fun" and have people play them need to follow this recipe in the first place. The violence is probably intellectually understood as "wrong" by the large mass of players, but in my opinion it still desensitizes and erodes normal reactions against it to a level that should not be acceptable.
so 60% of britons have read a book in the last 12 months, this is literally the most positive news i've seen about britain in over a decade. 60% seems nuts based on the people i know in real life.
It's physically easier (no tiny books deep back sandwiches between large encyclopedias), similar books or books in a series are often the same kind of size (cookbooks are larger, paper back novels are smaller), if you know what the book you want looks like it's very easy to narrow down where it is and it's very easy to put things back/together.
Because books come in different sizes, but the number of different sizes is relatively small. So, if the number of books is more than can be fit on one shelf, it most likely makes the most sense to organize by size.
Too much stuff to read already (teh internets).
Also, plenty of stuff to watch, or to play. Reading a whole book is a lot of commitment, and, unlike watching another season of whatever, usually can't be done together.
They should also quantify how many of the books that people are reading are trash fiction and self-help books. Not many people that read are actually reading substantive, educational works.
So, I listen to about 25 audiobooks per year (mostly fantasy and sci-fi, with a few political, popular science or popular economics book sprinkled between). I'm quite happy about that, because it's something that I can do in bed, while travelling to/from work, while doing groceries, etc.
You might say that it's my "escape from reality".
But.. well.. who cares?
I don't think that my unending love for Dungeon Crawler Carl is somehow making me a better person.
I think that something much more relevant is how much exercise people get, how many people do weekly sports or exercise for example? And that's something that the Hacker News crowd in particular will likely score worse on then how many books they read per year.
This seems bit like anti-intellectualism to me. I perceive mention of physical exercise as red herring here because you can do both. Actually that is what I do also while commuting.
Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is.
> Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is.
I disagree that audiobooks are not a substitute to actual reading, with respect to your point regarding the medium itself. Perhaps you have a point regarding the kind of material and listening that one can multitask/commute while listening. But stories were first transmitted orally and provoked imaginations and creativity with the same limited information all the same, and continue to. It is arguably the more primitive and natural medium for storytelling but that for a period it was only economical to disseminate them very widely by writing. Whatever beneficent mental work goes into reading fiction especially I believe happens in aural listening.
If on the other hand you argue that it is the work that goes into interpreting the written word visually, I would say that the same work happens outside of fiction as well, including all the lowbrow and instrumental reading that we do all the time nowadays.
The main difference is that when "listening" most people here talk about doing it while doing something else.
Whereas reading requires a person's vision to be focused on the book, and therefore precludes driving, and most other activities. The book therefore receives the readers full attention, it's not background music to the commute.
The difference in attention is significant.
Given all of that, I don't think the "reading a book" metric is really significant in measure how thoughtful society is, given that most books mentioned here are vacuous make believe. Entertainment is fine, but reading "Pink Unicorns Fly Through Hyperspace" isn't expanding anyone's awareness of the world.
I love reading and other intellectual activities, so I’m by no means anti-intellectual.
But I do abhor elitism - whether cultural or intellectual. I reject the idea that 'high culture' defines intelligence or value, and by extension, I question whether we can truly measure the intellectual level of a society based purely on how many (or which) books they read.
You're right that physical exercise is somewhat tangential to this discussion. My point wasn’t to distract but to challenge the idea that book-reading is the sole meaningful metric for personal or societal development.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is outstanding. My partner and I blew through the most recent one in mere days after it came out. It's going to be a long wait for #8.
If you haven't, I highly recommend Orconomics as well. J. Zachary Pike is a masterful writer.
Tons of people listen to podcasts, that's a massive genre. That's probably better than doom-scrolling, although most podcasts are fluff anyway. It's often just entertainment masked as something intellectual.
Other place I can think is in bed before sleep. I would guess that lot of reading happened at that time before too. But ease of smartphones replaced it.
Definitely. It's not like prime literature, but it's good, entertaining reads. I was 12 when I read his books and I got in contact with so many concepts previously unknown. Things about art, the Catholic church, places in Europe, the CERN, the LHC. The first contact I had with the concept of cryptography was reading Digital Fortress. The first time I heard about the NSA was reading Digital Fortress. It definitely expanded my view of the world.
I read 10-20 books a year - but I think this obsession with book reading is excessively chauvinistic. If the benefit of reading is consuming complex long form stories, don't we get that from long-running TV series, audiobooks, visual novels, videogames, manga? If the answer to that is NO - then the benefit is the mechanical act of reading text? Well we do that on social media, news, group chats.
I do not see how it is possible that the benefit of reading a book has not been subsumed by all of the content we manage to absorb in modern media.
How can you not see that graphic media beams itself right into your lazy brain while reading fiction forces you to exert (and exercise) your visual imagination? Unless you're the type who doesn't form pictures in his mind as he reads on.
And (depending on what you read, of course), reading can give you serious literacy gainz. And focus too, as another poster wrote.
I must admit that I find it honestly laughable and pathetic that people are not able to identify the benefits of reading. Reading makes you smarter in large part from the information contained within the book that you learn by reading it, not from some kind of abstract mental exercise you get from looking at words. If you wish to exercise yourself mentally, you would play video games. Yet despite the high cognitive effort of them, no one attributes to games this great enlightenment that supposedly comes from reading. This is because games do not confer any practical information to the player where a book might to the reader.
Yes, often said - here's a quote from some guy (Sir John Lubbock) writing in 1894:
There is a certain art in reading. Passive reading is of very little use. We must try to realise what we read. [...] we must endeavour to realise the scenes described, and the persons who are mentioned, to picture them in the "Gallery of the imagination."
That's not set in contrast to the TV or computer games of 1894, of course, but in contrast to "reading listlessly or mechanically". So is it really true that the TV, with its greater bandwidth that uses all the senses*, prevents the viewers from imagining things? This is no more than a matter of taste, I think. If you watch The Walking Dead instead of reading it (I've never done either, this is only what I assume) you'll have certain things set in stone, like how a character looks, which might otherwise be flexible in your imagination. But so what? If you then have a daydream loosely based on the same theme then you have complete freedom to introduce whatever elements you like: therefore, don't read a book, take a siesta instead?
*Several of the senses. It doesn't make smells or caress the viewer yet, but you know what I mean.
I consider those different in that these alternatives do a lot more hand holding. While all media is geared towards being engaging and accessible, the results are different if you're going the route of most common denominator visual content, or targeted at a niche and building a long form narrative with no visual aid. Social media is specifically engineered towards a short attention span, and most shows and movies don't tickle the imagination muscle a whole lot.
While there is no doubt plenty of content out there that I am sure is actually stimulating the brain in a healthy way, I wouldn't consider it the norm for either of the media mentioned.
Well if you think brain stimulation is the benefit of reading, then you must surely think playing video games is much better for you than reading books since it is no doubt much more stimulating for the brain. Call me crazy, but I think the benefit of books is limited to the information you might learn from reading them. Smart people read books for the useful information in them, rather than people who read books become smart simply through the act of reading making their brain better.
You're crazily instrumental, because there's a benefit to pleasure. In almost all instances, fun is learning, but exactly what a person learns is personal and obscure.
I agree that "all knowledge is not equal", but I have lots of confusing things to say about that.
* Knowledge is something I value. Is "useful in life" a metric for its value? This only passes the buck to other values, such as being well fed. I'd rather say that some knowledge is more "useful to the growth of knowledge".
* Elf politics are not fun to the uninterested. Do equations become fun when you're interested? I think so, but only sometimes, somewhat. There are things, culturally, that we'd mention if put in a focus group and asked to itemize fun. Things other than equations, on the whole.
* People, curse them, exist in different problem situations. So elf politics may be statistically more relevant to the problems people in the world grapple with than the equations of motion are. This is different from being deep. But it still means that the elf politics is what those people need, and what we want them to learn about, if they're into it.
* Ideally, we should only be having fun. In practical reality we have to deal with contingent shit we don't like. This is not an effective way to gain great understanding, but that form of learning is "useful" since it pays the rent.
My answer to all of those questions: it doesn't matter. A person is considered to be smart when they are apt at solving the problems they tend to encounter. My point is that reading books alone doesn't confer this ability to any notable extent, whereas you'll find smart people read books relevant to the problems they solve which is why they are considered smart. The notion that reading exercises the mind to create intelligence in the same way one might exercise a muscle to improve it is disproved by showing that other exercises of the mind fail to have that effect.
All stimulation is not the same, obviously. Social media is very stimulating, after all. It just happens to be in a numbing, harmful way for little to no benefit. Gaming has the same if not more potential than shows and movies have, it just happened to have suffered the fate of the visual entertainment industry. It shoves large parts of the potential aside for the sake of maximizing profit, opting for cheap stimulation over valuable stimulation. Aside from the de facto benefit that the act of reading itself has for the brain, maybe the distinction isn't so much between long form written content and other media. Maybe it's just that this form of media isn't quite as susceptible to deterioration and profiteering, leaving more tangible value in it. I don't think that is entirely unreasonable. Maybe those other types of media being so much newer makes them more compatible with hyper-capitalization.
> Social media is very stimulating, after all. It just happens to be in a numbing
Numbing is the opposite of stimulating.
> leaving more tangible value in it
The word value here is ill-defined. I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
Your point being? Over-stimulation in the short term can be numbing in the long term by building up tolerance. And that's assuming that stimulation is somehow a one-dimensional thing and it can only ever be one or the other. The brain is complex, stimulation can go many ways, and simplifying too much is not constructive.
> I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
In the previous reply it was only informational value. Putting that aside, this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so. There is no such thing as The Entertainment just as stimulation does not happen along a single axis.
> Over-stimulation in the short term can be numbing in the long term by building up tolerance
You are confusing mental stimulation with visual stimulation. We were talking about mental stimulation, not merely entertaining colours and lights. Mental stimulation is something which causes you to think rather than observe.
> this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so
Yes everything is very multidimensional and that conveniently means you never have to explain the concrete meaning of the words you chose to use.
Then maybe try reading what I'm saying. It should be pretty obvious that I think the mental stimulation that is supposedly attributed to books is massively overrated which is evidenced by the fact that more mentally stimulating things do not have those same benefits attributed to them.
It doesn't seem like you care to communicate anything, really. You've pivoted and conflicted your own words multiple times now, and you were markedly annoyed before I asked questions, which is what prompted them in the first place.
"Books are about information primarily. Then they are about stimulation, of which there is only one type. But not that kind of stimulation." You seem most interested in figuratively listening to yourself talk, because I refuse to believe that your goal is to convince a stranger on the internet that instead of picking up a book they might as well binge whatever is hot on Netflix, which is all I've gathered from your words.
Your comment history seems similarly pessimistic and snarky, and other commenters in sibling threads seem to be getting a similar impression.
> You seem most interested in figuratively listening to yourself talk
Projection.
> Books are about information primarily. Then they are about stimulation
I have repeatedly said that my point is that books provide stimulation but no more than some other media and that it is not the principal benefit of books over said other media (video games primarily). You have been in bad faith for this entire conversation repeatedly failing to grasp this point and then putting words in my mouth which you then use as evidence I contradict myself then gaslighting me when I get annoyed about you doing it. I assumed you were merely not grasping the concept before but this is clearly malicious.
> I refuse to believe that your goal is to convince a stranger on the internet that instead of picking up a book they might as well binge whatever is hot on Netflix, which is all I've gathered from your words.
It's good that you refuse to believe that. Maybe do a bit of reading and thinking to figure out what my actual point is. Here is a useful excerpt from past posts of mine:
> It should be pretty obvious that I think the mental stimulation that is supposedly attributed to books is massively overrated which is evidenced by the fact that more mentally stimulating things do not have those same benefits attributed to them.
> I think the benefit of books is limited to the information you might learn from reading them
Can you figure out from these two quotes which you have access to what my position on books is? Why I think they're better than a Netflix show? Yes you can because you literally did it:
> Books are about information primarily
Then in the next sentence you wonder how I could possibly think that books are better for you than a medium with less information in it. I sorry if you genuinely lack the mental capacity to figure this out on your own, but you can hardly expect me not to be annoyed by it. Especially when you go out of your way to read my comment history to insult me, try a nice little game of "everyone doesn't want to be your friend", and then act all holier than thou about it.
> you have been in bad faith for this entire conversation repeatedly failing to grasp this point
No. I am repeatedly failing to understand why you're trying so hard to make this point. To me. I simply stated my thoughts. I didn't try to prove anything, or ask to be converted or proven wrong on something that I thought was obviously enough subjective.
> this is clearly malicious
Yes, I maliciously tried explaining why I think the way I do after being needlessly challenged in it. I wasn't trying to convince anyone or win some intellectual debate. I still don't understand where the problem is. This comment thread is everything I wish HN wasn't like.
I think I understand your issue now. I stated my opinion (made an argument) and then you stated your opposing opinion (made a counter argument) and this chain continued in a format called a debate. Basically, you want to be able to argue with me, but you think I shouldn't argue with you. Not really fair, is it? If you don't want an argument, then you have to stop making posts which can be replied to. Most people will assume you are trying to argue with them if you keep making arguments at them, and while you may not want these arguments to be interpreted as arguments, they fundamentally are arguments and you can't expect other people not to notice that.
Not all brain stimulation is the same. Just from the example you brought up: books vs video games, a book has a very different pace than a game, it's even self-paced, you are in control of reading a passage and pondering about it. It gives time for reflection, it gives time to be read again if it tickled your brain in a funny way, in this process there's a different way of insight.
A video game has a different pace, different games have very different pace, some will give you a similar experience allowing you to stop and wonder, others will tumble you around frantically.
Books are much better to foster deeper introspection, there's a reason why it's the chosen medium for explaining ideas in detail.
I think you are considering all of this in a very reductive dimension, it's not a line gradient from 0-100, it's a whole plane to be analysed with different axes.
> Books are much better to foster deeper introspection, there's a reason why it's the chosen medium for explaining ideas in detail.
Language is chosen as the medium of communication because there is no real other option, not because writing something in a book makes people think about it more.
> A video game has a different pace, different games have very different pace, some will give you a similar experience allowing you to stop and wonder, others will tumble you around frantically.
Utter nonsense. All games allow you to stop and think because all games terminate at some point, after which you may reflect on the decisions you made. All games have a failure state which provides a lull in action for the precise purpose of allowing reflection. There is little difference between gaming and reading in this regard. A gamer is just as free as a reader to reflect on their experiences, or not to do so. And just as how you cannot reflect while participating in a game, you struggle to reflect on a book while simultaneously reading more of the text.
> Utter nonsense. All games allow you to stop and think because all games terminate at some point, after which you may reflect on the decisions you made. All games have a failure state which provides a lull in action for the precise purpose of allowing reflection.
As someone who gamed a lot in life while also liking to read, utter nonsense. No game has ever gave me the opportunity to re-read the same "page" or sentence on the spot, multiple times in a row, triggering another layer of thought or insight from the same 3-5 seconds. None.
I'm not as free to reflect on the experience while the game keeps going on, the lulls are pre-programmed, not my own pace, I cannot stop mid-sentence and realise something new, a game guides to the completion of that action and stopping mid-way is unnatural, opposed to a book.
It's a very different experience, I really cannot comprehend how you are saying they are absolutely equivalent...
> No game has ever gave me the opportunity to re-read the same "page" or sentence on the spot, multiple times in a row, triggering another layer of thought or insight from the same 3-5 seconds. None.
Maybe you just haven't played the right games? Many do in fact allow you to do this. CRPGs usually allow you to take as much time in a conversation or dialog as you want or even replay whole conversations, and Visual Novel games often have an explicit log of every line that you can go back to and read through.
It's not all about reading, anyway. An open-world RPG is a special, dream-like thing, and inspires me with all kinds of thoughts, but I prefer my RPGs (or roguelikes or sims) not to be polluted with stories - which, come to think of it, is because stories trammel the imagination, putting the game "on rails", as is sometimes said. Nor do I want a story to emerge as I play: that's not even what the whole experience is about. It's kind of like looking at a picture. Fragments of story-like things come to mind and fade away again, and again, inspired by the setting, while you handle the mechanisms and tactics of the gameplay as a kind of exciting meditation.
I only play games that are turn-based, or that I can pause. Those are the only real games. The others are like fairground rides. Maybe once in a while I'll play pinball or something but it's a whole other category (and story-laden adventure games are another category again).
> No game has ever gave me the opportunity to re-read the same "page"
You shouldn't claim to know anything about games if you have never willingly replayed a level of one after completing it. Or even replayed a level full stop, as the better analogy here is one where you fail to fully grasp a passage on the first try just as one might fail to complete a level on the first try. In fact, the way you seem to think a game is entirely pre-programmed and moves independently of your interaction with it makes me wonder if you've played any games at all. Which game were you thinking of when you wrote this post? Everything you mentioned has very obvious analogues in gaming.
> In fact, the way you seem to think a game is entirely pre-programmed and moves independently of your interaction with it makes me wonder if you've played any games at all.
You are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I said, in either case you are wrong.
> You shouldn't claim to know anything about games if you have never willingly replayed a level of one after completing it. Or even replayed a level full stop, as the better analogy here is one where you fail to fully grasp a passage on the first try just as one might fail to complete a level on the first try
Of course I did, and that's why I'm stating with absolute certainty that this isn't at all close to my relationship and experience with books.
> Which game were you thinking of when you wrote this post? Everything you mentioned has very obvious analogues in gaming.
I'm thinking of games with any kind of history/lore ranging from titles I'd consider more similar to books such as "Day of the Tentacle", "Full Throttle", to the modern incantations like "Last Of Us", passing through adventure/action games like "Castlevania", "Metroid", "Ultima" series, "Elder Scrolls" series, "Final Fantasy" series (played only VII, VIII, Tactics but they all follow the FF formula), "Legend of Zelda" (played all the SNES/N64 and the Switch ones), and also modern incantations like "Dark Souls", "Metal Gear Solid" (played 1 and 2), so on and so forth, just a brief list of what I'd like to mention to shutdown the argument that I don't know what I'm talking about.
None of these games were ever the same experience as a book, they are their own media, with its own strengths but never, ever really like my experience with books.
> just a brief list of what I'd like to mention to shutdown the argument that I don't know what I'm talking about.
Maybe try a puzzle game (sokoban games provide a similar experience to the one you describe), or a multiplayer one. It seems your experience with games is fairly limited, and what you've done here is basically the equivalent of listing a bunch of Marvel movies to "shut down" the argument that you don't know much about cinema. Or for a more topical example, listing the Harry Potter books and Tolkien as proof you are well read.
> None of these games were ever the same experience as a book
Well it's a good thing we're talking about "mental stimulation" rather than "giving you the same experience as a book". There are obvious differences between games and books. Games have a controller, books often do not. Games often have different colours in them, books rarely do. I don't see much productive in you simply telling me that a game is different from a book, I know this. It is the core of my argument. That a game is different from a book, provides a greater level of mental stimulation, and yet doesn't have the supposed mental benefits that reading does, therefore these benefits are likely overstated in books. I also hypothesise that observed benefits of reading come from ideas presented in specific books rather than the mere act of reading any text. Any difference between games and books is only relevant to this discussion as it relates to those ideas.
> don't we get that from long-running TV series, audiobooks, visual novels, videogames, manga?
Different media affect and engage us in different ways/modes, and reading is a process that requires a particular set of skills that is different vs watching TV.
Much like listening to music with one's eyes closed vs reading the notation – one might get a sense of the composer's intent, structure, theme, emotion, etc. from both, but there are major qualitative differences in the two media.
- focus is deeper on a book, even more on paper (your brain can only turn pages)
- most social media or web content doesn't describe landscapes, feelings, humans thoughts. due to various mental issues, I could clearly feel how reading novels about humans change your brain state in way other text don't.
the whole tech era is wrong on this, a lcd with characters is not the same as a book
As someone who has not read a book in years and often jokes that they may never will again, I think the most valuable thing about capital-R reading is improving and expanding your vocabulary. Rereading sentences, stopping to look up words, etc. Knowing the right words to express yourself and communicate with others as accurately and precisely as possible is powerful, and I don't think consuming video affords nearly as much development of those skills (audio maybe a bit more, and video games potentially count as they can in theory contain a similar level of reading as a book).
Not all Britons are equally likely to pick up a book. While two-thirds of women (66%) say they have read or listened to a book in the last year, just over half of men (53%) say they have.
This is not necessarily unique for Britain and feels like more of a world-wide trend. Of course, this can be partly explained by women reading a lot of romance books, I think it could be a worrying trend for the future. Reading is an important aspect of a man's life. Sitting down and being forced to uninterruptedly focus on a singular task is exactly the kind of thing that is missing from many lives of young men.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal
Why can't it be meditation, programming, working out, listening to music, fishing, mountain climbing, going for a walk, or something similar?
Why the focus on reading in particular, as if it were some great act? What if someone only reads books written for the MAGA crowd, is that something that many young men are missing in their lives?
I suspect it doesn't capture how knowledge is ingested now. I haven't read a book in over a year now. But I do read papers (academic), news articles, technical blogs and YouTube lectures.
I practically don't have the time to read for leisure - tech moves very quickly, and that takes up the bulk of my thinking/study time/energy
Even for leisure, many topics are better served by more timely online options. I certainly read more now than I did before the internet, but that includes only 1 book in the last year.
"YouGov Survey Results Sample Size: 2121 adults in GB Fieldwork: 29th - 30th January 2025"
I can't find their methodology anywhere. Given some of the results,
I expect:
- This is based on self reported unverified answers, probably overinflated in terms of how many books actually read because people don't like to be perceived as a 'non-reader'.
- potentially also a selection bias? How were interviewies selected? Ho random was the selection process? Did they randomly phone people (would this count as fieldwork)? Were they standing outside a library or uni? Did they hand out 10.000 forms and put up a dropbox?
As a student I worked for some of those companies to which 'fieldwork' eas outsourced. There was not much supervision besides "get back 150 filled out questionairs today".
Reading a book isn’t always easy and requires dedication. Some time ago I decided to read a Victorian novel in original (English is my second language) and it took me months to complete.
Adults only have so much time to read, that you need to do it at an expense of other important things.
The devil is really in the details: not all books are created equal, because simply reading a random fiction book doesn't automatically convey moral or intellectual superiority. Elucidation through deliberate intellectual effort combined with a healthy information diet is necessary beyond simply cargo cult pantomiming one habit or another.
If we are speaking of reading a book to completion, I’d have to admit it’s been perhaps not a full year, but a while.
I do not like to read from screens. The next book I was keen on, from the Culture series, arrived from Amazon (ordered new) with signs of heavy water damage, making it unwieldy to read. I have been in a limbo of not wanting to deal with that and not wanting to be wasteful by ordering another one. There are also more non-fiction books that have been in various stages of completion for more months than I would care to admit.
However, while I like books, I wonder if in the golden age of information (now drawing to a close) it should be expected that fewer books would be read without a decrease in literacy or education: for a while in somewhat recent past non-fiction books used to be the only way of obtaining a wide variety of information, a lot of which is now covered by numerous other sources (blogs, references, and so on).
What counts as a book? The survey gives the impression it's just reading for pleasure?
This probably plays into the class divide, my wife hates reading (for pleasure) she says that comes from having to read a lot at work. I imagine a lot of people read quite a bit but maybe have less interest in reading in their free time for entertainment.
On the same boat. With a toddler, there is almost no time to devout to a full book. I got “lucky” due to a 28 hour flight trip and managed to read 1 book.
Technically I only read (as in completed) 2 books last year. My average pages per day was ~466 though (e-reader pages, which are not quite 1:1 with real book pages but pretty close, I think).
Well it comes in phases. Last year I read a new book every few days. I probably read 30 books or so, then I got sick of it and stopped. Haven't read a single one since then but also dont care too much about it.
I've found watching a tv series and reading a book are very similar. They both share two key issues:
First reason there are good and bad books, and finding the good ones is really difficult for me. Just like with a tv show, I will stumble on a book and read it, it will be a great book that really moves me and makes me think. Now hooked on books, I will look for more books. I will read one after the other. I will eventually find one thats tiresome or "bad". I will fight through it. But then when the next book is also not great, I will stop entirely. Exact same happens to me when watching tv shows (last great one was succession).
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Second reason is just getting sick of the medium in general. Like with many things in live I just get sick of reading. It also happens to me when I regularly watch tv shows, at some point I get sick of the activity all together and stop for a few months (or years).
Being in my mid 70s I have found that a corpus of fiction amounting to about 100 books is enough for me to read in a cycle without any sense of repetition. One of the benefits of forgetfulness.
I do intersperse with a pile of non-fiction, mostly history, which I march through about a chapter at a time.
It's crazy to me how many comments in here are saying how they don't have time to read.
The lack of free time in modern society is the source of so many of our problems. Historically, people had way more leisure and down time. The amateur anthropologist/youtuber Stefan Milos mentioned this in one of his videos recently when talking about human rituals.
I'd really like to know how much time folks are spending on their phones instead of doing something that would count as leisure or free time activities. It's not hard to read for 10-30 minutes but I'd wager most people wouldn't bother when they can scroll for that same amount of time, especially in public. It's way easier to shove your face into your phone in public than to read a book. I find myself doing that all the time, so I'm not trying to take anyone down.
Remember "being bored" as a kid? Having nothing to do so you'd make up stuff with your friends? Good times.
I think books are a bit of an outdated format related to mushing up trees, turning them into a product and putting them on shop shelves. I read all the time but seldom whole books these days as they often seem to force an idea which could be communicated in say ten pages to be padded out to 400 pages to fit the retail requirements.
This sentiment seems sort of sad. The medium is the message. If the medium is small, the message will be small. It may be succinct and you may think you "get it", but without evidence, examples, and context, they won't stick. It's like a good tweet: repeatable and rolls of the tongue, but easily refutable and without context. I cannot imagine compressing all of the ideas in a book like "Antifragile" or "Godel, Escher, Bach" in 10 pages. It would be so short as to be meaningless, the ideas are too big.
Same for fiction. I don't want 10 pages of world building. I want immersion. "The Sun Also Rises" would be miserable at 10 pages. Nobody is trying to communicate an idea in this case, they're communicating an aesthetic, a "vibe" or a mood. 10 pages of that and on to the next thing? Sure, if that's your medium, but the medium is the message, and the book is a unique medium for communicating big ideas, immersive worlds, and extensive moods and aesthetics. I sure hope the medium for those things isn't out of date or the world will seem a little shallow.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadAfter checking it includes audio books which might explain it, but still... 60% of Britons have read/listened to a book in the last year? I doubt it.
A picture of a rock might or might not provoke any particular thoughts about rocks in the viewer.
But if I write anything more than the purely descriptive "there is a rock" then I have conveyed some sort of thought about the rock or rocks in general, and at the very least you have been introduced to my thought, and very likely you have also reacted with some thought of your own. And the mechanical process of reading gave you the time and venue for that to happen.
Even if I do try to be purely descriptive, it's impossible to seperate my perception from the output. I can only describe what I noticed and considered noteworthy. I litetally cannot write the equivalent of a photograph of a rock, but can only write my thoughts about that rock.
The photograph may contain more data, but no opinions and no understandings. The viewer can possibly have no thoughts at all about it, and not actively notice most of the data, or the significance of various bits of the data, but the reader must have at the very least the thoughts of the writer, and it will be almost impossible not to have some sort of thougts of their own in reaction to reading the writers.
Other things also provoke thought, including video games. But I only asserted "more".
An incurious person can fail to think about anything at any time.
And you fail to think about games. Interesting what you say about yourself.
It is a contrived exception because you have to pick a special video game and a special book to make it work, and the example will not hold when picking 100 books at random and 100 games at random, and that's even granting that the cherry picked example even holds, which I actually deny.
The tone of your post suggests you're refuting this wholesale. I think you're wrong, reading books makes you smart(er) at least by expanding your vocabulary and widening your understanding of the world by putting in front of you experiences from people that are not exactly like you.
You're offering video games as an alternative, but people that invest a lot of time in playing video games as opposed to reading, usually do it with terrible games, where the lesson to learn is that life is expendable, enemies must be stopped at all costs, genocide is valid as long as you're the main character, etc. Games as art form rarely engage people in the same way as mass murder types of games. What are the sales numbers of Disco Elysium vs Call of Duty?
And yes, pulp exists in writing too, probably to an even greater extent, but at the same time the peaks are higher and, in my opinion, the benefits, as subjective as they may be, greater.
You make an almost credible post but then totally undermine it with this statement. It's rather like saying Looney Tunes is bad because the intended lesson is that you should set your cat on fire.
My problem is not that games make kids shoot schools, is with the fact that games in order to "be fun" and have people play them need to follow this recipe in the first place. The violence is probably intellectually understood as "wrong" by the large mass of players, but in my opinion it still desensitizes and erodes normal reactions against it to a level that should not be acceptable.
... and then by size. It's the most aesthetically pleasing for me, genuinely.
What are some possible causes?
I want to own my books, and ebooks are a Wild West of DRMs. I don’t trust them.
You might say that it's my "escape from reality".
But.. well.. who cares? I don't think that my unending love for Dungeon Crawler Carl is somehow making me a better person.
I think that something much more relevant is how much exercise people get, how many people do weekly sports or exercise for example? And that's something that the Hacker News crowd in particular will likely score worse on then how many books they read per year.
Audio books are fine but actual reading is important too. The "escape from reality" is not relevant part but being served without doing the work is.
I disagree that audiobooks are not a substitute to actual reading, with respect to your point regarding the medium itself. Perhaps you have a point regarding the kind of material and listening that one can multitask/commute while listening. But stories were first transmitted orally and provoked imaginations and creativity with the same limited information all the same, and continue to. It is arguably the more primitive and natural medium for storytelling but that for a period it was only economical to disseminate them very widely by writing. Whatever beneficent mental work goes into reading fiction especially I believe happens in aural listening.
If on the other hand you argue that it is the work that goes into interpreting the written word visually, I would say that the same work happens outside of fiction as well, including all the lowbrow and instrumental reading that we do all the time nowadays.
Whereas reading requires a person's vision to be focused on the book, and therefore precludes driving, and most other activities. The book therefore receives the readers full attention, it's not background music to the commute.
The difference in attention is significant.
Given all of that, I don't think the "reading a book" metric is really significant in measure how thoughtful society is, given that most books mentioned here are vacuous make believe. Entertainment is fine, but reading "Pink Unicorns Fly Through Hyperspace" isn't expanding anyone's awareness of the world.
But I do abhor elitism - whether cultural or intellectual. I reject the idea that 'high culture' defines intelligence or value, and by extension, I question whether we can truly measure the intellectual level of a society based purely on how many (or which) books they read.
You're right that physical exercise is somewhat tangential to this discussion. My point wasn’t to distract but to challenge the idea that book-reading is the sole meaningful metric for personal or societal development.
If you haven't, I highly recommend Orconomics as well. J. Zachary Pike is a masterful writer.
I’m not sure it’s that much more virtuous to read a few Dan Browns or John Grisham per year though?
I do not see how it is possible that the benefit of reading a book has not been subsumed by all of the content we manage to absorb in modern media.
And (depending on what you read, of course), reading can give you serious literacy gainz. And focus too, as another poster wrote.
There is a certain art in reading. Passive reading is of very little use. We must try to realise what we read. [...] we must endeavour to realise the scenes described, and the persons who are mentioned, to picture them in the "Gallery of the imagination."
That's not set in contrast to the TV or computer games of 1894, of course, but in contrast to "reading listlessly or mechanically". So is it really true that the TV, with its greater bandwidth that uses all the senses*, prevents the viewers from imagining things? This is no more than a matter of taste, I think. If you watch The Walking Dead instead of reading it (I've never done either, this is only what I assume) you'll have certain things set in stone, like how a character looks, which might otherwise be flexible in your imagination. But so what? If you then have a daydream loosely based on the same theme then you have complete freedom to introduce whatever elements you like: therefore, don't read a book, take a siesta instead?
*Several of the senses. It doesn't make smells or caress the viewer yet, but you know what I mean.
While there is no doubt plenty of content out there that I am sure is actually stimulating the brain in a healthy way, I wouldn't consider it the norm for either of the media mentioned.
* Knowledge is something I value. Is "useful in life" a metric for its value? This only passes the buck to other values, such as being well fed. I'd rather say that some knowledge is more "useful to the growth of knowledge".
* Elf politics are not fun to the uninterested. Do equations become fun when you're interested? I think so, but only sometimes, somewhat. There are things, culturally, that we'd mention if put in a focus group and asked to itemize fun. Things other than equations, on the whole.
* People, curse them, exist in different problem situations. So elf politics may be statistically more relevant to the problems people in the world grapple with than the equations of motion are. This is different from being deep. But it still means that the elf politics is what those people need, and what we want them to learn about, if they're into it.
* Ideally, we should only be having fun. In practical reality we have to deal with contingent shit we don't like. This is not an effective way to gain great understanding, but that form of learning is "useful" since it pays the rent.
Excuse the inconclusiveness.
Numbing is the opposite of stimulating.
> leaving more tangible value in it
The word value here is ill-defined. I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
Your point being? Over-stimulation in the short term can be numbing in the long term by building up tolerance. And that's assuming that stimulation is somehow a one-dimensional thing and it can only ever be one or the other. The brain is complex, stimulation can go many ways, and simplifying too much is not constructive.
> I can only think of "entertainment value" which is often sacrificed to make more profit and which books are clearly lacking when compared to other more entertaining things.
In the previous reply it was only informational value. Putting that aside, this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so. There is no such thing as The Entertainment just as stimulation does not happen along a single axis.
You are confusing mental stimulation with visual stimulation. We were talking about mental stimulation, not merely entertaining colours and lights. Mental stimulation is something which causes you to think rather than observe.
> this also reduces something to a single dimension when there is really no reason or benefit in doing so
Yes everything is very multidimensional and that conveniently means you never have to explain the concrete meaning of the words you chose to use.
"Books are about information primarily. Then they are about stimulation, of which there is only one type. But not that kind of stimulation." You seem most interested in figuratively listening to yourself talk, because I refuse to believe that your goal is to convince a stranger on the internet that instead of picking up a book they might as well binge whatever is hot on Netflix, which is all I've gathered from your words.
Your comment history seems similarly pessimistic and snarky, and other commenters in sibling threads seem to be getting a similar impression.
I wish you the best. Truly.
Projection.
> Books are about information primarily. Then they are about stimulation
I have repeatedly said that my point is that books provide stimulation but no more than some other media and that it is not the principal benefit of books over said other media (video games primarily). You have been in bad faith for this entire conversation repeatedly failing to grasp this point and then putting words in my mouth which you then use as evidence I contradict myself then gaslighting me when I get annoyed about you doing it. I assumed you were merely not grasping the concept before but this is clearly malicious.
> I refuse to believe that your goal is to convince a stranger on the internet that instead of picking up a book they might as well binge whatever is hot on Netflix, which is all I've gathered from your words.
It's good that you refuse to believe that. Maybe do a bit of reading and thinking to figure out what my actual point is. Here is a useful excerpt from past posts of mine:
> It should be pretty obvious that I think the mental stimulation that is supposedly attributed to books is massively overrated which is evidenced by the fact that more mentally stimulating things do not have those same benefits attributed to them.
> I think the benefit of books is limited to the information you might learn from reading them
Can you figure out from these two quotes which you have access to what my position on books is? Why I think they're better than a Netflix show? Yes you can because you literally did it:
> Books are about information primarily
Then in the next sentence you wonder how I could possibly think that books are better for you than a medium with less information in it. I sorry if you genuinely lack the mental capacity to figure this out on your own, but you can hardly expect me not to be annoyed by it. Especially when you go out of your way to read my comment history to insult me, try a nice little game of "everyone doesn't want to be your friend", and then act all holier than thou about it.
No. I am repeatedly failing to understand why you're trying so hard to make this point. To me. I simply stated my thoughts. I didn't try to prove anything, or ask to be converted or proven wrong on something that I thought was obviously enough subjective.
> this is clearly malicious
Yes, I maliciously tried explaining why I think the way I do after being needlessly challenged in it. I wasn't trying to convince anyone or win some intellectual debate. I still don't understand where the problem is. This comment thread is everything I wish HN wasn't like.
You are still displaying the problem behaviour despite having it clearly explained to you.
A video game has a different pace, different games have very different pace, some will give you a similar experience allowing you to stop and wonder, others will tumble you around frantically.
Books are much better to foster deeper introspection, there's a reason why it's the chosen medium for explaining ideas in detail.
I think you are considering all of this in a very reductive dimension, it's not a line gradient from 0-100, it's a whole plane to be analysed with different axes.
Language is chosen as the medium of communication because there is no real other option, not because writing something in a book makes people think about it more.
> A video game has a different pace, different games have very different pace, some will give you a similar experience allowing you to stop and wonder, others will tumble you around frantically.
Utter nonsense. All games allow you to stop and think because all games terminate at some point, after which you may reflect on the decisions you made. All games have a failure state which provides a lull in action for the precise purpose of allowing reflection. There is little difference between gaming and reading in this regard. A gamer is just as free as a reader to reflect on their experiences, or not to do so. And just as how you cannot reflect while participating in a game, you struggle to reflect on a book while simultaneously reading more of the text.
As someone who gamed a lot in life while also liking to read, utter nonsense. No game has ever gave me the opportunity to re-read the same "page" or sentence on the spot, multiple times in a row, triggering another layer of thought or insight from the same 3-5 seconds. None.
I'm not as free to reflect on the experience while the game keeps going on, the lulls are pre-programmed, not my own pace, I cannot stop mid-sentence and realise something new, a game guides to the completion of that action and stopping mid-way is unnatural, opposed to a book.
It's a very different experience, I really cannot comprehend how you are saying they are absolutely equivalent...
Maybe you just haven't played the right games? Many do in fact allow you to do this. CRPGs usually allow you to take as much time in a conversation or dialog as you want or even replay whole conversations, and Visual Novel games often have an explicit log of every line that you can go back to and read through.
I only play games that are turn-based, or that I can pause. Those are the only real games. The others are like fairground rides. Maybe once in a while I'll play pinball or something but it's a whole other category (and story-laden adventure games are another category again).
You shouldn't claim to know anything about games if you have never willingly replayed a level of one after completing it. Or even replayed a level full stop, as the better analogy here is one where you fail to fully grasp a passage on the first try just as one might fail to complete a level on the first try. In fact, the way you seem to think a game is entirely pre-programmed and moves independently of your interaction with it makes me wonder if you've played any games at all. Which game were you thinking of when you wrote this post? Everything you mentioned has very obvious analogues in gaming.
You are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I said, in either case you are wrong.
> You shouldn't claim to know anything about games if you have never willingly replayed a level of one after completing it. Or even replayed a level full stop, as the better analogy here is one where you fail to fully grasp a passage on the first try just as one might fail to complete a level on the first try
Of course I did, and that's why I'm stating with absolute certainty that this isn't at all close to my relationship and experience with books.
> Which game were you thinking of when you wrote this post? Everything you mentioned has very obvious analogues in gaming.
I'm thinking of games with any kind of history/lore ranging from titles I'd consider more similar to books such as "Day of the Tentacle", "Full Throttle", to the modern incantations like "Last Of Us", passing through adventure/action games like "Castlevania", "Metroid", "Ultima" series, "Elder Scrolls" series, "Final Fantasy" series (played only VII, VIII, Tactics but they all follow the FF formula), "Legend of Zelda" (played all the SNES/N64 and the Switch ones), and also modern incantations like "Dark Souls", "Metal Gear Solid" (played 1 and 2), so on and so forth, just a brief list of what I'd like to mention to shutdown the argument that I don't know what I'm talking about.
None of these games were ever the same experience as a book, they are their own media, with its own strengths but never, ever really like my experience with books.
Maybe try a puzzle game (sokoban games provide a similar experience to the one you describe), or a multiplayer one. It seems your experience with games is fairly limited, and what you've done here is basically the equivalent of listing a bunch of Marvel movies to "shut down" the argument that you don't know much about cinema. Or for a more topical example, listing the Harry Potter books and Tolkien as proof you are well read.
> None of these games were ever the same experience as a book
Well it's a good thing we're talking about "mental stimulation" rather than "giving you the same experience as a book". There are obvious differences between games and books. Games have a controller, books often do not. Games often have different colours in them, books rarely do. I don't see much productive in you simply telling me that a game is different from a book, I know this. It is the core of my argument. That a game is different from a book, provides a greater level of mental stimulation, and yet doesn't have the supposed mental benefits that reading does, therefore these benefits are likely overstated in books. I also hypothesise that observed benefits of reading come from ideas presented in specific books rather than the mere act of reading any text. Any difference between games and books is only relevant to this discussion as it relates to those ideas.
Different media affect and engage us in different ways/modes, and reading is a process that requires a particular set of skills that is different vs watching TV.
Much like listening to music with one's eyes closed vs reading the notation – one might get a sense of the composer's intent, structure, theme, emotion, etc. from both, but there are major qualitative differences in the two media.
as other said:
- focus is deeper on a book, even more on paper (your brain can only turn pages) - most social media or web content doesn't describe landscapes, feelings, humans thoughts. due to various mental issues, I could clearly feel how reading novels about humans change your brain state in way other text don't.
the whole tech era is wrong on this, a lcd with characters is not the same as a book
This is not necessarily unique for Britain and feels like more of a world-wide trend. Of course, this can be partly explained by women reading a lot of romance books, I think it could be a worrying trend for the future. Reading is an important aspect of a man's life. Sitting down and being forced to uninterruptedly focus on a singular task is exactly the kind of thing that is missing from many lives of young men.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal
Why can't it be meditation, programming, working out, listening to music, fishing, mountain climbing, going for a walk, or something similar?
Why the focus on reading in particular, as if it were some great act? What if someone only reads books written for the MAGA crowd, is that something that many young men are missing in their lives?
I practically don't have the time to read for leisure - tech moves very quickly, and that takes up the bulk of my thinking/study time/energy
I can't find their methodology anywhere. Given some of the results,
I expect:
- This is based on self reported unverified answers, probably overinflated in terms of how many books actually read because people don't like to be perceived as a 'non-reader'.
- potentially also a selection bias? How were interviewies selected? Ho random was the selection process? Did they randomly phone people (would this count as fieldwork)? Were they standing outside a library or uni? Did they hand out 10.000 forms and put up a dropbox?
As a student I worked for some of those companies to which 'fieldwork' eas outsourced. There was not much supervision besides "get back 150 filled out questionairs today".
https://yougov.co.uk/about/panel-methodology
They have a panel.
Adults only have so much time to read, that you need to do it at an expense of other important things.
The devil is really in the details: not all books are created equal, because simply reading a random fiction book doesn't automatically convey moral or intellectual superiority. Elucidation through deliberate intellectual effort combined with a healthy information diet is necessary beyond simply cargo cult pantomiming one habit or another.
I do not like to read from screens. The next book I was keen on, from the Culture series, arrived from Amazon (ordered new) with signs of heavy water damage, making it unwieldy to read. I have been in a limbo of not wanting to deal with that and not wanting to be wasteful by ordering another one. There are also more non-fiction books that have been in various stages of completion for more months than I would care to admit.
However, while I like books, I wonder if in the golden age of information (now drawing to a close) it should be expected that fewer books would be read without a decrease in literacy or education: for a while in somewhat recent past non-fiction books used to be the only way of obtaining a wide variety of information, a lot of which is now covered by numerous other sources (blogs, references, and so on).
This probably plays into the class divide, my wife hates reading (for pleasure) she says that comes from having to read a lot at work. I imagine a lot of people read quite a bit but maybe have less interest in reading in their free time for entertainment.
I just don't get much time where
* It's a decent block of time
* I won't be distracted or need to do something else
* I want to be alone
* I can be alone
* I'm mentally engaged enough
* I'm not trying to fit something else in like exercise
If you include kids books it's 1-2k but they're not really the same.
I've found watching a tv series and reading a book are very similar. They both share two key issues:
First reason there are good and bad books, and finding the good ones is really difficult for me. Just like with a tv show, I will stumble on a book and read it, it will be a great book that really moves me and makes me think. Now hooked on books, I will look for more books. I will read one after the other. I will eventually find one thats tiresome or "bad". I will fight through it. But then when the next book is also not great, I will stop entirely. Exact same happens to me when watching tv shows (last great one was succession).
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Second reason is just getting sick of the medium in general. Like with many things in live I just get sick of reading. It also happens to me when I regularly watch tv shows, at some point I get sick of the activity all together and stop for a few months (or years).
I do intersperse with a pile of non-fiction, mostly history, which I march through about a chapter at a time.
The lack of free time in modern society is the source of so many of our problems. Historically, people had way more leisure and down time. The amateur anthropologist/youtuber Stefan Milos mentioned this in one of his videos recently when talking about human rituals.
I'd really like to know how much time folks are spending on their phones instead of doing something that would count as leisure or free time activities. It's not hard to read for 10-30 minutes but I'd wager most people wouldn't bother when they can scroll for that same amount of time, especially in public. It's way easier to shove your face into your phone in public than to read a book. I find myself doing that all the time, so I'm not trying to take anyone down.
Remember "being bored" as a kid? Having nothing to do so you'd make up stuff with your friends? Good times.
Same for fiction. I don't want 10 pages of world building. I want immersion. "The Sun Also Rises" would be miserable at 10 pages. Nobody is trying to communicate an idea in this case, they're communicating an aesthetic, a "vibe" or a mood. 10 pages of that and on to the next thing? Sure, if that's your medium, but the medium is the message, and the book is a unique medium for communicating big ideas, immersive worlds, and extensive moods and aesthetics. I sure hope the medium for those things isn't out of date or the world will seem a little shallow.