Ask HN: Are books worth it?

As an author I am encouraged by all the great responses here. In addition to writing a book a year I read about 50. My question for OP: How do you learn anything if you are not reading books? Sure, you can learn a lot about a subject online. When I write a book I spend about 6 months reading everything I can find (including books). Then I organize what I have learned and present it (I hope) in an easy to absorb manner. A reader can learn everything I know about a subject in 4-6 hours. Want to learn about the Cold War? Read Gaddis' seminal book on it. Want to learn about WWII? Read Winston Churchill's five book series that won the Nobel prize for literature? Civil War? Shelby Foote. If history is not your thing what about biography? There are biographies of practically every founder of great tech companies. (Jobs, Gates, Musk). How about ideas? Malcolm Gladwell (Tippingpoint), Michael Lewis (Mondeyball). Or maybe break into reading with fiction. Give yourself a present of the complete Lord of the Rings. If you liked the movies be prepared to love the books. If you hated the movies, no problem, the books are far better. OR science fiction. Read all of Heinlein's books for young adults. Start with Double Star then read Have Space Suit Will Travel. A Door Into Summer speaks to any engineer. Tunnel In the Sky is the classic survival story. When you are hooked on Heinlein read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; it only takes a chapter to get used to his interesting take on what English of the future will sound like.

I hope you are encouraged by all the great reasons listed in the rest of the comments. I for one live to read!

The definitive answer is "it depends on you, are they?"

I know that isn't helpful but lets unpack a number of things from your question and address them separately.

First lets talk about skill. You said "I read slowly and I don't remember everything I read either."

In my experience most people don't remember everything they read, but they do remember the "big points" that a book was trying to make. I say this to reassure you to not get hung up on how much you retain, you can always re-read the book and get more out of it. But the other part was you said you "Read slowly."

Reading is a skill, like bicycle riding or playing the piano, or shooting baskets in basketball. The more you practice it the better it gets. A strategy I used with my kids and with folks who are new to reading is to find books that are not too challenging to read, and are engaging which means you want to read them. Science fiction stories, mysteries, any of a number of categories of fiction meet the bill. Go to your nearest library and ask a librarian for some suggestions on things to read that have good stories. Ask for skill ranges from early reader to college level. Check them out, read them all, and make notes of the ones that were interesting, the ones that weren't, the easy ones to read and the hard ones to read. No need to write a book report just write down "Read '1001 Arabian Nights', found it entertaining but kind of boring." or what ever your take was on the book. Since you aren't "learning" from these books, just practicing your reading skill, you should not be anxious if don't remember all of the details or even who the main characters were. Go back to the library and give your take on the books to them and ask them to help with picking out 5 or 6 more. Rinse and repeat.

What this does is it hones your sense of what you find "fun" to read. And when it's fun, just like video games, there isn't really a question of where does the time come from. But let's talk about time for a minute.

You called out that books were a "big time investment." Which is true, it is one way to invest your time. What are your other time investments? Have you done the experiment where you journal how you spend time every day for a week? Doing that will give you insight into what you are spending your time on now and give you an idea of what you are "investing" in. Reading will develop your vocabulary, sense of humor, conversation skills, knowledge, and mental acuity. That is what you get by investing in reading books, compare that to what you are getting out of your current investments and perhaps that will inform your choice on how much time you might spend. Also it is useful to remember that you can start and stop reading easily, carrying a book on your commute (if you aren't driving) is an easy way to get extra value out of your time, you are both going or coming from work and you are improving your reading skills! bonus!

Then there is this: "I always assumed that everything could be found for free online." This isn't ever going to be true. Not the 'free' or 'online' part, the found part. While most information ends up online, either legally, quasi-legally, or illegally, finding it is becoming exponentially harder as various forces work to monetize, hide, or discredit it. Having worked at a search engine that indexed billions of nominally "good" web sites I can tell you that our experience was that 99.999% of it was crap. Finding the good stuff is really really hard and getting harder. And it moves so finding it a second time can be just as hard.

The bulk of the things you want to know can be found already written, in books, by someone who spent time collecting the information, verifying its veracity, writing it up, having an editor help them rewrite it for clarity and having a reference department check it for accuracy. You can check those things out at a library for free. You can buy them for small change at rummage sales and yard sales, and you can share them with others by swapping books.

What I've found as I've gotten older is that books for me fall into three categories, entertainment, working knowledge, and reference knowledge. I found the "Dune" series by Frank Herbert very entertaining and keep a copy on my book shelf. I have a copy of "The Art of Electronics" with post-it "flags" at sections I often refer to as part of my working knowledge set. And I've digitized (scanned into OCR'd PDF files) dozens of text books which I think of as my "reference" set. I use a simple search engine to look up specific things in those books.

Bottom line: Work with a librarian at your local library to beef up your reading skills and ability to use a library. Then use those skills to read books that make you feel happy or more useful or more knowledgeable. You may find, like I did, that reading is more fun that watching television or playing video games. Or you may not. Again, it's a question only you can answer.

I’ve read about 60% of this book, but didn’t feel it got anywhere after the first chapters. So let me ask the question for this book specifically, is it worth reading in full, or did it get its important points across after the first chapters?

Nearly all non-fiction reading is junk-reading.

Reading is an observational activity, and just like you can't learn to swim by observing swimmers you can't learn a subject by reading a book on it. The only thing that reading is good for is feeding fuel into the furnace of deliberate practice of the craft and discussions with practitioners of such. And that's how true knowledge is really acquired - putting information to a practical use. If you're not doing that you're just grinding water. A quality conversation qualifies as "practical" in that exercises the relevant parts of the brain, in fact Socrates would have you believe it's the only way to truly learn.

Even by these low standards we lack in quality reading:

- Book writers have, naturally, limited experience. Yet most are eager to summarize it and pose as "the truth", with predictably disastrous results. People who actually know a lot and a can summarize well rarely write. I know like one guy who is good at it (you know him too).

- Book writers write too much while trying, but not quite succeeding, to get to the point. Often times they try to start from the beginning and produce a theory of everything (search "it's a warm summer evening in ancient Greece" on youtube). There is a draught in the writing skill. The irony.

- Book publishers insists on larger books because they look better on the shelf and are more likely to fetch a higher price per buyer.

- Book publishers largely publish books that are easy to sell given the current fads, the ones that confirm pre-existing bias of the reader populace. It might as well be readers directly dictating what the book says.

- Online publishing has most of the same problems (except for the content length), and lots worse on top.

The only educational reading is one that directs your practice of a given field or a conversation with another practitioner. Everything else is entertainment at best and mental torture at most other times.

As to finding good books - books that stood the test of time are likely to be better quality, because fads come and go so whatever made the book popular it's something better. Often times they are dated though. Otherwise just be mindful whom you're getting your advice from. Did this person explain clearly to you how fractional reserve banking works? They might have a good idea on which book is decent for the subject.

I love reading, however, I am sad to say, most books are NOT worth "it" (being read).

There are many, many books in the world. Only very few of them are good. I don't know the percentages - perhaps 0.001%%

The good books are worth reading, but they are difficult to find.

As for information from web sites vs information from books: some books are just the content from web sites blown up into book format. So there is no general rule of "books are better than web sites", either.

Even though I am a fast reader (I think), I find many books too wordy.