Ask HN: Are books worth it?

But it is completely different from seeing pictures of them.

What books are worth it? Hmmm. Depends. But some are very much so.

Is The Art of Computer Programming worth it? Is little Rudin worth it? Is the “Feynman lectures on Physics” worth it? Is “The Ides of March” worth it?

Depends.

- Whether it's books, videos, short-form articles, long-form articles, academic papers or podcasts, it's about searching for good information and positive stimulation. Both of these criteria are subjective.

- How you search and filter is also highly personal. It might be that your needs are such that the content you find in those mediums you listed are ideal for you.

- For me, people who write books and people who do videos/articles/podcasts are often not the same people, and I tend to be more interested in what the book writing people have to say.

- Videos/articles/podcasts present first-hand ideas far less often. The opposite is true: authors of interesting and original ideas often elect to convey them through books. Again, subjective.

- If an idea is novel enough, short-form mediums like those you listed are not enough to convey it. A book (or rather its length compared to e.g. article) allows the author to explore and swim around in his ideas. You need that for innovative ideas. Noam Chomsky said that at the time (1960s or 70s) how much time you got to present your idea on TV -- 5 minutes -- was not enough to change a person's opinion, so the medium itself framed the discourse. Same applies to all mediums. It pays to be mindful of that.

- A good book is much better than a good series or film. HBO's Game of Thrones versus GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose versus the recent series. Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series versus Netflix's Altered Carbon. Same goes for non-fiction.

- I'm a lover of film, but I turned to books because there's only so many good movies, but there's orders of magnitude more good books. Same goes for fiction and non-fiction.

- If you're looking for stimulation, rather than technical information, a book lasts much longer. I've stretched out reading some book series for years and it was awesome.

- If you don't enjoy a book, don't read it. Don't hope that it will get better or that it will have been worth it. Odds are stacked against it. I regret that when I started getting into books way back when I forced myself to read even those I didn't immediately like; I now know to give a book a serious 30-60 minutes and if my gut says no that's that. Reading takes time so spend it enjoying yourself. This applies to technical reading too.

Any recommendations?

When people are telling you to read books they aren't referring to those kinds of books though; they're usually talking about popular nonfiction books published in the last few years. My experience there has been that books are slightly better edited and fact-checked than online blog posts, but it's not really sufficient and they are often still full of bullshit. There are good books and bad books and the range of variation is similar to everything else written.