Ask HN: Are books worth it?

I'm 39 years old and books have been an integral part of how I define myself as a human. I grew up with books and they've been a constant presence in my life regardless of what I was doing. It is my personal belief that there is no substitute for good books. By books I don't mean the paper medium, I mean long form narrative that you can absorb and revisit on your own time, it could be eBooks, paper books, audio books are a bit trickier for me but they do fit my own personal criteria mentioned above.

What I think you've been missing the most is the experience of immersing yourself in a book. The way you've been consuming content which is with small nuggets of information is very common today. Most people these days (regardless of age) don't want to invest too much time into content "reading", everyone want the TL;DR, the bullet lists, the KPIs, and in my opinion that this prevents many people to actually discover what is enjoyable about books.

You'll seldom read a book in a single reading session (unless it is very small). If the book is good, it will resurface in your mind, you'll ponder about it between reading sessions. You'll not be engaged with it only when you're reading it, you'll be with it through the whole experience and also after it as it makes an impression in you. By being able to control how the content flows (which is not the same with a movie) you can stop to think about stuff without losing content (this is trickier with audiobooks). You can come back again over paragraphs that made an impact on you and study them to understand why. You an take notes to help you reason about stuff. Lets imagine that take you two weeks to read a book in a casual pace, all that knowledge and content will be with you. The curiosity to know more about it, to get back reading, to learn what happens. That lasts longer, it is a more involved process than consuming video. A good lenghty book might change how you think as you spend a long time with it.

Humans are moulded by the stories they tell and by those they've been told. Books in one form or another have been with us through millennia. They've formed us and will keep doing that in the future in whatever form they evolve to. For me, it is the different of diving deep into something and how wetting your feet in some shallow puddle.

Another important aspect in favour of consuming more books is that there is a chance of reading content by the original author in the original form (or something close to it), which makes it for a more intimate conversation between you and the author. Just stop and think with me for a second, a book is a conversation between you and the author across time and space. You might be reading a long gone author in their original words, getting to know their style, how they thought, what they valued. This is different than absorbing content via a third party which is telling you what they've thought about it, which is the case of podcasts (which I love too, they are awesome but I prefer books). Getting your content from "primary sources" is very different than via third, fourth or even fifth parties.

Even though we produce a lot of audiovisual content on the internet, it doesn't encompasses the whole spectrum offered by books. Yes there are a gazillion videos about Sun Tzu Art of War but there is a lot of longform content that is not popular or clickbaity which doesn't surface through the algorithms used by those social networks we tend to use to discover new stuff. Content from books trickle very slowly to the digital realm. It is like an iceberg, you get a lot of content above the water but unless you're prepared to dive into it, you be missing a ton of stuff. Only very popular information is moved to the internet in a way that it appears easily to people browsing social networks or searching. There are many good stuff that is very hard to find online unless you really know what you're looking for, which makes discovery of such content a bit hard.

I'd urge you to engage with books not because millionaires do it, but because you want to do it. While it is true that some fields move too fast and you'll get the best content about them online. For a lot of other fields, books are better.

To be fair, an audio ‘book’ is no longer a book - in a very important sense. Reading is not a strictly linear process, while listening (to a recording) most certainly is. (And no pictures.)

Yes, Definitely, books are worth it. I was at the same place as of you ~3 years ago, doubting the value of reading books - so, I can speak to it.

tl;dr: For breadth, online reading is good enough; while for depth and study, books tend to be the way to go. No matter which medium(book/audiobook/summaries), reading more is always better.

I can think of at least 4 major differences between online content and books. 1. Comprehensiveness 2. Background research 3. Test of time 4. Focus and grounding

Let me explain.

1. Most of the online content is "designed" to be consumed in 2. "92% of the online content is designed to prove a point" (Above statement is a made-up one, and I have no idea what percentage of the online content is made up)

A lot of content available online are valuable and accurate. At the same time, the credibility of online content is questionable, while books tend to be more research-oriented. A person has spent at least 6 months to put together a book, and multiple people spend hours to get it out. Books tend to be more linked to the credibility of the author. Paul Graham's essays (http://paulgraham.com/articles.html), for example, are gems and it doesn't matter if it is consumed as a book or a blog - it does contain valuable content.

3. Books age well than online content - some of the timeless classics still stay relevant in the current decade or century. More people review them, so more crowdsourced opinions. This might sound contrary to the belief, but this is something I've observed over time.

4. Most importantly, you may devour the internet for a whole day, and learn a bunch of things but the very next day, because everything was so unstructured, you'd tend to lose clarity and only a few things stick. This is more pertinent to some people than others. So, consuming or learning about new concepts systematically through a book will improve the stickiness of the ideas and be more structured while thinking about it. Books, also tend to be more detailed with more examples to put things in context, to which you can relate to. It gives you time to think and organize. Think about it as taking a structured course, rather than learning bits and pieces from here and there.

Now, the Pareto Principle (80/20) does apply and reading 20% will give you general context on 80%. But more often than not, on most subjects, 20% does contain in-depth information you'll miss out on.

Listing a few books I recommend, which I believe are worth reading

[1] The Science of the Artificial by Herbert A. Simon [2] Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter [3] Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan Peterson [4] Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari [5] A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle [6] Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [7] Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche [8] The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann [9] The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell [10] Essence of the Upanishads by Eknath Easwaran

Short answer: yes, you're missing. Books (usually) have more curated content, have more research and are better at keeping you focused.

Here are some good pointers on how to start/improve your reading, using a medium you're already into (podcast):

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/21/781673493/how-to-read-more-bo...

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/26/782946619/not-a-regular-reade...

Also, it's totally fine to not like a book: just start reading it, or skip chapters, etc. Number of books read also means nothing, just read what you want to read.

Finally, fiction/novels are also a great source of wisdom/inspiration. Don't disregard them. Some of my favorites: the Foundation Series, LOTR (of course :P), old books by Stephen King, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky.

> I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list on GoodReads, but almost never bother to read any.

> The last few books I read were mostly filled with fluff, anecdotes, stories, jokes, and trivialities.

> I thought that online content was roughly equivalent to 80% of what I'd get from reading actual books for 20% of the effort.

For self improvement and pop-business books, it's more like you can get 99% of the value from 5% of the effort by reading about the book, or skimming it, rather than reading it closely.

> Are books worth it?

You need to know what this "it" is first. I don't mean that flippantly. Do many people find reading books useful or enriching or valuable? Oh, yes, certainly. Now: worth what? To you? Are films worth "it"? Are Casablanca, The Seventh Seal, the Up documentary series, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Mars Attacks!, and Debbie does Dallas, worth "it"? Are they all replaceable with a bunch of 5- to 15-minute Youtube videos?

> Is it more true for some fields than others?

Self-improvement, pop-business/leadership books, and generally anything written to sell consulting services (there's a lot of that in both those categories) are regarded as kinda jokes. If you're looking there for wisdom you're combing the desert for a pearl.

> Is it more true for older books?

The filter is that if a book is still considered good decades, centuries, or millennia after it was written, it very probably is good. Good books somtimes don't pass this filter (these are periodically rediscovered) for various reasons. But almost no bad or low-value books pass it.

> Isn't most of the information from books freely available online?

Not at all. Start studying any topic past the surface level and the only way you'll get any further "online" is buying or pirating ebooks. Keep digging—not even that far—and you'll find some that do not exist in digital form, not even on Library Genesis. If you want to seriously learn about a topic, pick up a good academic book on it, then follow up on all the books they (very probably) mention in their introduction as other major works on the topic, and maybe also the books that book directly credits as references. Often this is a faster and more accurate way to learn what the expert consensus of "foundational" works in a topic is than trying to find that out online, let alone trying to learn the information contained in those works purely online, without books (usually impossible).

> Am I missing out?

What is "it"?

> One issue for me is that books are a very big time investment. I read very slowly and I don't remember everything I read either.

Take notes.

> Even if I wanted to read books, I just don't know which ones I should start with, out of the 1000 "must-read" books in my reading list.

Stop. Pick, like, five that seem really important or that you just most want to read. Aim for variety, don't pick five all on the same topic. Ignore the rest until you're done. Don't even think about them. If you're not going to finish five there's no damn point in maintaining and stressing out over a list of 1,000. They'll still be there when you've finished your five.

One further note: as hinted at by the movie comparison above, reading a book is a process and that process is part of the effect of the book. The time it takes, the curation or generation of material by one author or editor or a team of same working together, the focus and intention of the creators, these matter. Reading 200 blog posts is not the same experience as reading a book, even if they mostly cover the same territory. A tree can become boards, but boards cannot become a tree.