Ask HN: Are books worth it?

Books can really belong to you rather than a hardware device.

A well-written story, be it fiction or non-fiction can have a long lastig impact and even an emotional connection that I have personally never experienced with anything 'online'.

If you don't read books, you are missing out. Even only 1 or 2 books a year is a world of difference, even if those books aren't the best ones out there. This (as posted before) also has to do with the time investment and realtime one-to-one (you and the book) time.

If you are having a hard time getting started, or keep reading a book to the finish, start with something light and perhaps... generic. Like a Dan Brown book. (and I know opinions vary wildly) Even a smaller book that might be more targeted as a children's book such as Neil Gaiman's 'Ocean at the end of the lane' are perfectly fine to get something going. Not everything will engage you, but making it easier for yourself to get started and enjoy some reading time is all it takes to enrich yourself. (which is perhaps not the best wording... but I'm no writer)

I have always loved books. I read about 30-40 a year, mostly fiction with a few non-fiction thrown in.

Novels are the closest thing I know to a form of magic. A good author can completely encode an entire world full of people on 300 pages of black and white text. And when they do it well, it literally never expires. I read mostly books from the last 50 years but I think the best example of a book as magic is Don Quixote. It was published in 1605. You can pick it up today and relate to the characters, enjoy the plot, and laugh at their jokes. Most other forms of popular media go stale in a year or maybe a decade.

You will also find that reading great writers improves your ability to think and speak. The true masters, someone like John Steinbeck or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, construct sentences so beautifully that they can stop up in your tracks. After reading enough some of this will rub off on you and you'll be shocked at small bursts of eloquence in your thoughts and speech.

So I strongly advise everyone to read at least a few good novels a year. You won't regret it.

As for non-fiction I think the need is a little less obvious. Many times after reading a 400 page book I think "I'd probably have preferred a 30-page article on the subject". However that's not always true and many NF authors earn their word count. But I can totally see the argument for the internet as replacement for NF.