Also, it's frustrating in any leisure activity where I'm actively 'consuming' media, I find myself 'project managing' that consumption - what I mean is, for video games, I can only play 3 games at any given time and I can't add any from my queue into the rotation until I've finished one.
Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
#42Get a Kindle. I started reading again when it became a lot more convenient, thanks to the kindle. I think I finished reading all the Wheel of Time books because of the convenience of the kindle (it gets boring around book eight, before a well deserved end). Paper books are heavy and expensive. It doesn't work for all books, as it is not a good PDF reader, but for anything that's more text than graphics or layout, it'…
I agree that e-readers are a great thing for convenience. I highly disagree that the Kindle should be recommended by default. Nook offers a similar experience to Amazon without being Amazon, and Kobo has more options for fonts (including custom fonts from the publisher).
Re: Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
#43So it would not be a good idea to wait for someone to just summerize this on medium?
Jokes apart ; attention span going down is certainly a concern but do you think we all are getting way more lazier? Shortcuts, one line stack overflow answers, instant results and 2 min quick fix tutorials are not just killing attention spans but also making us lazy and bad developers.
Re: Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
#44I don't think it's because you're squeezed for time, but more that you're sense of time has changed. You're probably used to extracting information you want in a very short period of time via sites like StackOverflow or Wikipedia or whatever. If you're like me, when you encounter something that isn't going to give you the gold quickly, you probably move on to something that will. You're used to the quick turnaround,…
Agree that everyone's sense of time is changing. I struggle with this - I can't keep myself from speed-reading/skimming longer form text.
I do think this is problematic, and not all good. A great deal of knowledge still requires significant length of text to convey -- sure, the retrieval cost for any individual limited concept on the internet is much lower, but you're not going to develop a rich understanding of, as a hyperbolic example, the history of China, from one article or from Wikipedia.
Re: Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
#45My experience is that my motivation for consuming books is cyclic. Part of it is due to other interests and commitments...I read almost nothing for pleasure during grad school and then spent what felt like every non-working moment reading for the next year. Then there have been two periods where I read The Economist cover to cover every week. The first was two years the second was one...well almost or maybe most of one.
That sort of hits on the other major reason for cyclic reading. My tastes and interests change. Sometimes the right book comes along at the wrong time...and sometimes the same right book comes along twice, by which I mean that one of the interesting things about getting older is that rereading books is not rereading the same book. The greater narrative of which it is a part has changed as I have changed.
One of the other features of getting older is that not finishing a book doesn't bother me anymore. I'm ok if a book doesn't speak to me or stops speaking to me. I enjoy finishing books, but don't see not doing so as quite the moral failing I once did. Maybe I'll come back. Maybe it wasn't that good. Maybe it's overdue. Reading for pleasure is supposed to be pleasurable and the suffering of a hard book or long book or a challenging book has to be worth it, and making it worth it is the author's responsibility, not mine.
Anyway, not having time is the biggest constraint, e.g. currently the time slot that I had been using to read is being used to journal. It's a tradeoff.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
#46I only skimmed through these responses. same.
Re: Ask HN: Do you find reading increasingly challenging?
#47Get a Kindle. I started reading again when it became a lot more convenient, thanks to the kindle. I think I finished reading all the Wheel of Time books because of the convenience of the kindle (it gets boring around book eight, before a well deserved end). Paper books are heavy and expensive. It doesn't work for all books, as it is not a good PDF reader, but for anything that's more text than graphics or layout, it'…
I agree that e-readers are a great thing for convenience. I highly disagree that the Kindle should be recommended by default. Nook offers a similar experience to Amazon without being Amazon, and Kobo has more options for fonts (including custom fonts from the publisher).
I have only experienced the kindle, so I can't comment on the others.
But I agree with you, just because endorsing a particular brand was not intended, I only wanted to suggest the particular technology of e-Ink readers instead of paper books.