Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one.
How do you avoid the problem of low signal to noise ratio?
Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition.
I’m curious too. I’m at the point where I stop reading books of some categories altogether. I read a bunch and they have all the same message.
Such books about:
- "the economy is shit and we are just waiting for the mega crash" (popular in Germany)
- books about sustainability (buy less shit, don’t waste so much)
- anti-consumerism (we consume to much stuff, but buy this book)
- minimalism (own less stuff)
- bootstrapping a software company (find an audience, build a product, release, iterate)
- nutrition (eat food, mostly plants, not too much, everything else can’t be properly researched because of long time horizons and an incapability to find causation)
- correlation is not causation (and here are one hundred examples, Freakonomics style)
Get it from a pirate site (l--g--, zlib----), survey the sections, and skim a few pages. That'll let you know if it's 90% filler or 90% useful content for you.
One person's useful content is another person's filler. It depends on how familiar or agreeable you already are with the material or advice in the book, and how difficult a read you're willing to tolerate.
I only read books where i have a recommendation. This can either from a conversation or just a mention in a Blog post or here on HN in a comment.
Its definitely not a 100% method but i feel like that the chance that the book is not well written is much lower when at least one person found it readable/enjoyable.
I have a Trello Site for that where i create a card for every book and write down or copy+paste the recomendation.
I also typically download the book from libgen first, take a quick look at it and then buy the book.
I get a high ratio by reading old books that are still highly regarded.
If it’s been around for generations and people have and continue to find it worthwhile, it’s a pretty good indicator that it will be a good use of time.
It’s not perfect, but the hit rate is much better than when I dip into pop psych/business/self-help books.
I do still read modern books, but only when something strikes me as particularly worthwhile.
I spend some time researching books before I read them; very low signal-to-noise books typically will have reviews saying that. I also mostly avoid whole categories of books which are prone to this; I still get bitten once in a while, but like in one book out of 20 maybe, so overall it's not bad.
I wonder why publishers seem to lean towards 500-pages books. Very complex ideas have been expressed in 10-page articles, spreading probably much smaller amount of information across hundreds of pages does not help.
While I agree with you about the observation that many non-fiction books seem unnecessarily padded with filler, I think it’s because otherwise the book looks physically inferior and/or would be expected to cost less. And they’ve decided that this is the page count that optimises sales, instead of optimising reader satisfaction.
If someone’s at the book shop and see a bunch of one-inch thick books and a small 20 page pamphlet, they’d expect the pamphlet to sell for a fraction of the price. Or be tempted for the thicker book because “the author clearly did more work.”
I have the same feeling, however personally I'd prefer thin book to a thicker one even for a greater price in most cases, mostly because I just dont have enough time/stamina to dig through graphomaniac texts.
1. Readily give up on a book, or skim through the rest, the moment you realise that the book has 400 pages of filler
2. Find recommendations from thought leaders you subscribe to, while staying true to Rule 1 (Sometimes it's just a matter of taste, and it's counterproductive to force yourself to finish reading something just because someone else said that it's a good book)
You may want to check out Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/ They give you the condensed information. Usually it is enough to get an overview. For a deep dive you can follow up by buying the book.
Judicious online research will give you a much better signal than any single book will. But the book may engross you in a narrative or walk you through complex topics in stages. Read books because it's fun, not to accomplish a goal.
At this point I pretty much just read histories, mostly written by academics, and fiction. Most popular press books are simply garbage and almost anything written for the business community is likewise garbage.
Had I had the option to listen to audiobooks while I was in school, I would’ve been a much better student. I never read any of the assigned reading when I was in school because I couldn’t keep my focus on the words, but I’m finding myself cruising through about one very long book per month. Most of the books had been non-fiction (social science and history mostly), but more recently I’ve been getting into novels. They’re just so easy to listen to at the gym, or while driving, or while playing video games.
For all of you who have kids, please encourage them to listen to audiobooks if they don’t like reading paper books. That is, unless you think it’s a valuable skill to know how to bullshit their way through a paper on a book they haven’t read…
No question about it. There are more than enough great, great books that we waste our time (if our intention is to learn) reading much else. You don't have time to read them all. Nothing in a blog will compare.
More broadly, I find a strong correlation between the amount of time it takes to write something and the value, which shouldn't surprise us: The product of years of study and writing and rewriting should be far superior to the same person's hot take on social media. Books > quarterly journals > monthlies > weeklies > dailies > 24/7 hot takes.
I’d like there to be a “reader sophistication” metric that works similar to “you may also like” recommendations, e.g., if I look up Gene Wolfe, it gives me sci-fi authors in his vicinity of reading level or greater. I know that some have done this with lexical analysis of the text itself via LSA, but the results produce many false positives (i.e., high proximity).
Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition.