[EtDybNuvCu]

Books, as traditionally written, are too big for the amount of information which they typically contain. We need knowledge representation which is capable of coherently and consistently storing information in a more direct, relational format.

[aaachilless]

I've seen this sentiment many times before, and I usually respond with a variation of the following point:

If I took a book and stripped it down to the bare information, as you'd like, and then read this new information-pure skeleton, I wouldn't remember it as I would if I just read the book. I might only remember a few facts about Thomas Jefferson after reading a bio about him, but I wouldn't remember any facts if I just read the facts.

My hypothesis as to why this is true (disclaimer: this comes almost entirely from introspection): My mind doesn't store memories like a hard drive, you have to tell it a story (so to speak) to get it to remember what you said. My mind doesn't integrate purely relational data, it integrates narrative data. Yes, an important part of a narrative is context and relational information, but another key part of it is the cadence, the spaces interleaved between the stuff we remember. Unless your point was that we actually need a new architecture for our brains, I strongly disagree, albeit on a purely anecdotal basis.

[taneq]

Human memory is also associative. To retain a fact we usually need to know how it relates to our existing knowledge, a "hook to hang it on", so to speak.

[marklgr]

You don't have to do away with the storytelling structure; just make it significantly shorter and designed for information retention. Quite a few books contain a good deal of filler to reach the 250+ page threshold for marketing purposes.

A longer book is correlated, in the audience mind, with more content, more research done, more of an investment to read it hence more of a payoff ("it's a book you have to study"), and also more time spent reading it so potentially more pleasure, even for non-fiction.

Unfortunately, when you read a lot, these propositions start to become cons, and you'd often rather have just the meat--granted, not in a plastic plate, to run the culinary metaphor, but not with the three-hour ceremonial of the (would-be) fancy restaurant either.

[mercer]

I agree to an extent, but I've come to believe that the 'padding', often just examples that are variations of each other, is much more useful than it appears at first.

When I think back to books that I've read that felt like they had too much filler, I have to admit that many of the memories are the concepts via the anecdotes.

[marklgr]

So perhaps the author shot a lot of anecdotes at you and a few stick, but another author could have done the same job with half as many pages. Again, I'm not against storytelling or anecdotes.

[mercer]

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I've all but stopped reading the books that are mostly anecdotes with about an A4's worth of actual information.

[aaachilless]

I think we’re talking about two different ideas. It seems like you’re talking about a publishing problem, not a problem with books qua books. That said, I haven’t ran into this other problem either. If I thought an author was padding a book just to make a page threshold, I’d never read that author again.

[marklgr]

Ah, maybe we're talking of different things indeed. As for the padding, in my experience it happens very often, not with random sentences of course, but with unnecessary chapters, paraphrasing, too many anecdotes etc. If you think about it, it's not that surprising: why every idea worth a book should need 250+ pages to discuss? What about the many blog posts or TED talks artificially turned into a book, for money and prestige?

[mercer]

I suppose it's also why teaching can be so effective for learning things. Instead of things staying murky in your head, you're forced to create a narrative that not only you understand (or think you do), but another person can too.

Quite often I just get partly there by explaining something to myself as if I'm teaching myself, but it seems to have some benefit (but also with the introspection disclaimer there).

[benjaminl]

Then you will love blinkist.com, they summarize nonfiction book so that you can read or listen to them in 15 minutes.

But you might find that as other commentators point out, without the original packaging, although the summarized book contains all of the insights of the original, it is hard to retain the information.

[Too]

Speed readers usually say the same thing, you might be able to read and parse the text faster but your brain still needs the same time to process and assimilate the content, so you'll instead only end up with a buffer overflow of parsed but unprocessed text.

[gaius]

There’s no digital interface yet that beats flicking through a book and annotating the margins. Just as there’s no videoconferencing solution that beats a bunch of guys in a room around a whiteboard.