[ants_everywhere]

> Over the next 6 months, I read 30+ books on entrepreneurship, startups, marketing, “growth hacking,” and everything tangentially related I could find. And that doesn’t include the countless blog posts, articles, reddit threads, and whatever else I could get my hands on.

Self-help books in general (and entrepreneur porn books in particular) are notoriously thin on substance. It's no wonder that most of this was a waste of time. It's like saying that eating is a waste of time because once I ate nothing but peanut m&ms for a whole month and found that most of the calories were unnecessary for survival.

[xondono]

It’s a problem of how book publishing works.

Most of these self-help books are made because publishers can sell them, mostly on the name of the author.

At the same time, most authors could condense their “insights” into a 3-4 page article. The issue is publishing a 4 page article is not profitable, there’s too much fixed cost, and too little market price to absorb it.

The logical result is publishers that insist that a book must be extended to ~300 pages to be really profitable, and authors that pad their books with cherry-picked examples, anecdotes, “case studies”, and whatever else they can to get the book published.

[ianburrell]

I wonder if ebooks would help with length of books. There are short stories, to novellas, to novels on Amazon for fiction. Novels are definitely more popular partly people complain about the value of shorter fiction.

Self-help books could try having shorter ebooks. They would have to forgo printed copies since pamphlets don't work in the store.

[rrr_oh_man]

…especially something hands on like building a company. The marginal value of information is a rapidly falling curve.

It’s like kissing in 6th grade.

You can read all you want about theory and technique and tongue placement, but you don’t know shit until you’ve done it yourself.

[starstripe]

You're right, most nonfiction books read like they are just adding fluff to justify a full book. I normally just their summaries on Littler Books or something.

[antisthenes]

Yeah it seems like the author of this article just has piss-poor pre-selection mechanisms for deciding what to read.