[kashyapc]

As I've noted here before[1], Newport is on a 3-book contract on more or less the same topic with minor tweaks. And is likely to subtly market them to the hilt at every opportunity.

Besides unsound fundamentals (relying too much "third party stories", and other issues noted elsewhere), he focuses too much on "quantity" and "productivity" than on quality and effectiveness.

Sure, he has something of value to say, but he should absolutely have compressed it into one book, and avoid the filler content. But my (uncharitable?) conjecture is, as he values "productivity", he happily gives into the demand of publishers to have X number of pages in a book, to sell, lest it looks like a pamphlet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19047303

[paulriddle]

Books for general audience are filled with light content. That's just the way things are nowadays. It is not going to change. Any self help, any book about basics of something is going to have massive amounts of filler. I remember listening to Shallows: What Internet Does to Our Brains, and just suffering from being forced to listen to history about reading. How the monks or somebody read in the past, how valueable it was. I didn't care about any of that. I wanted to hear stories about people falling into deep depression because of too much internet. I wanted summaries of research into changes of the brain addicted to the internet. Instead what I got was history of papyrus, and what came after that, how novel it was, and how books became available for everybody, not just select few. How monks read aloud, and how there was one special monk who could read without speaking words. Terrible book.

I remember reading something about geniuses and high performance individuals, and of course examples were about sports. Because everybody understands sports and the book was for everybody. I wanted to read about workings of the minds of best mathematicians or professionals in intellectuals fields, like engineering, programming, businessman. As I was reading I felt physically ill, until I closed the book, yelled as loud as I can "BWHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH" and made a cup of coffee for myself. I realized that most of the books I wanted to read were fluff written for the publishers and editors. Not for me. I can get the idea from the title, description, table of contents, and maybe a few Amazon reviews.

I notice the same thing with technical books. Sections about history, long winded explanations of what is going to be taught paired with long conclusions. Recaps. I can't tell you how many times I've read history of Linux, and I can't remember anything about it: these mad diagrams of standards, what came from where, and how it was improved, extended and replaced by something else. I wanted to read a book on algorithms, a free one, it had very warm reception on HN[0], and guess what? It starts out with history of numbers. With detailed names of people who came up with ideas, of places, and even pictures. I hate these forms of introduction. But the book still seems to be good. I can recognize whether a book is "heavy" or "light". Heavy books often have exercises, they start fast, and go deep. Light books just can't get to the fucking point.

Heavy book: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective Light book: Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805624

[mark_l_watson]

You make good points. I used major publishers like McGraw-Hill, J. Wiley, Springer Verlag, etc. for the first ten books I wrote. You really give up a lot of control over subject matter. I now use Leanpub, write whatever I enjoy writing about. I pitch the advantages [1] of writing to people I know, and usually suggest writing one or two books with a publisher and after that self publish.

[1] largest advantage is getting to meet and get to know really interesting people. I enjoy writing but being an author also opens up a lot of opportunities.