A lot of non-fiction books have a lot of filler. No need to read 300 pages when a wiki articles or PDF gives you important points
Just Read the Book Already
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Re: Just Read the Book Already
#12I read about 30 minutes a day, using the following approach:
1. Kindle
2. Prepare lunch and dinner such that I have about 15 minutes of waiting time each time.
3. Read during this waiting time
After two days of reading this way, if I am not enjoying the book, then I drop it and move on.
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#13> The narrative action struck her as intolerably slow.
> She had, she concluded, “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels
Here she lays the blame solely on her, but I would think that it's also a writer's skill to hook the reader.
It takes two to tango, and if she felt the narrative was so slow she started to skim the sentences and ended up missing the deeper parts, perhaps the book could have used some trimming, better pacing, or a different approach to present the subject.
I feel that while we tend to read faster in general, we also read a lot more volume than the previous generations and I genuinely think we are pretty optimised to understand a lot very fast.
There is a ton of last century news articles or magazines that are unbearably slow and very diluted. Sometimes there will be deeper thoughts buried there, but 98% of the times it's not, which is depressing.
Even nowadays, there is a cute TLDR bot on reddit, and from times to times reading the original article really doesn't bring anything more than what the bot put in a more succinct way.
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#14For fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is…
In my current job I have a lot of downtime, which means I can do whatever I want for a few hours a day. I try to read but I find it so difficult. I don't know what it is about reading ebooks but I can't hold my attention on them for more than a few minutes at a time. I have a few physical books in my desk that I can focus on very well, but they aren't the ones I need right now. Considering ebooks are typically half t…
If you buy from Amazon, some books fall under their "Matchbook" program, where if you buy the paper copy you receive the ebook version for free or small additional cost ($2-3).
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#15“Readers” are so judgey. There is nothing wrong with reading the wikipedia summary of books instead of the whole thing. I read “Fellowship of the Ring” in middle school. Took forever! Put me off the whole enterprise.
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#16For fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is…
For books I'm trying to learn and retain from, like a textbook or a technical book it really helps me to take notes, underline, highlight, write questions, etc in the book itself. I think it both helps me retain it better the first time and then allows me to review the text later and get more out of it.
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my current job I have a lot of downtime, which means I can do whatever I want for a few hours a day. I try to read but I find it so difficult. I don't know what it is about reading ebooks but I can't hold my attention on them for more than a few minutes at a time. I have a few physical books in my desk that I can focus on very well, but they aren't the ones I need right now. Considering ebooks are typically half t…
If you buy from Amazon, some books fall under their "Matchbook" program, where if you buy the paper copy you receive the ebook version for free or small additional cost ($2-3).
O'Reilly used to do this until they ditched their online store
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#18For fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is…
I tend to prefer PDFs for technical books because it has a search feature. Most of the time I'm not reading a 1200 page technical reference cover to cover and of course Indexes aren't always comprehensive.
Re: Just Read the Book Already
#19For fiction I read e-books. However for all technical books, things like O’Reilly, No Starch, etc, I always buy physical. The decision to do that has very much 10x my learning. Even when it comes to long documentation (MySQL is an astounding 5,000+ pages) I’ll usually print out portions to cover if it’s reasonable. I don’t know why this has increased my learning so much. The best I can come up with is that memory is…
In my current job I have a lot of downtime, which means I can do whatever I want for a few hours a day. I try to read but I find it so difficult. I don't know what it is about reading ebooks but I can't hold my attention on them for more than a few minutes at a time. I have a few physical books in my desk that I can focus on very well, but they aren't the ones I need right now. Considering ebooks are typically half t…
Just to make sure, have you tried an E Ink display? They really make the difference for me. They look very much like paper and ink.