I’m having the same experience as you. It’s still a bit difficult to find a good book, but not as difficult as it is to find a single worthwhile blog post. Even the ones I used to enjoy just feel stale now. The blogs section of my bookmarks used to have at least 30 sites that I visited regularly. Now there are 0.
I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
41–50 of 300 posts
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#42I wish I could do this, as books are far more rewarding. However I keep getting distracted by regular browsing & SM.
consider quitting social media. what helped me best to do that was consciously recognizing ratio of time I enjoyed vs time I just got annoyed (by advertisements, censorship, dumb opinions by old school mates, all the political agendas circling) - it's like 1:9 or something.
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#43I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense. I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an…
Similar here. If a non-fiction book interests me, I check out the table of contents, try to derive the content from this and read a bunch of reviews on goodreads.com
Most of the time, it's clear that there's not much more in the book.
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#44As others have said, books and articles have a different purpose and audience. I enjoy reading books. But there are many, many good blogs and online periodicals that offer quality that you would not want to find in a book. For instance... What I don't enjoy - and have quickly learned to avoid - is this certain type of non-fiction book that ought to be an article or blog post. They're easy to find now, they're usually…
The brevity can be an advantage, I'd much prefer a dense 200-300 page essay to a long drawn out 500-page argument where the author loses both themselves and the reader. But I agree that some of those non-fiction books can be poorly written -- or thought out? They sometimes read like a string of supporting evidence for the author's hypothesis, while blatantly disregarding the evidence that does not support the argument.
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#45[dead]
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#46Love fiction, love a good blog post, can't for the life of me abide self-help nonsense, especially when it's dressed up as "management strategy".
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#47I’ve simply grown impatient (intolerant really) with people who appear to lack respect for my time (and perhaps their own).
That impacts videos, books, articles, blogs, emails, conversations, and so on.
It’s not “TL;DR” but it’s similar, and is not actually an artifact of ADHD or attention economy gimmickry or anything other than recognizing that my most valuable non-renewable resource deserves better allocation.
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#48I'd like to highlight a key idea for pack rats of knowledge/scholarship.
Life is too short for content that's not worthwhile (seriously).
If you're a serious reader, and you live upto 70+ year old, maybe you can finish off 15k books on various topics.
Library of congress alone has 38 million books. That's a meagre 0.04% of the content available at the great library.
Thus, the key skill seems not to be reading, but skipping the non relevant stuff. Get better at skipping stuff that's not worth it given our short lives!
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#49> Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many?
There are a lot of books, too. More than one could read in a lifetime, even if new ones stopped being released. Thus it doesn’t follow that quantity is the problem, or that if it is you’ll eventually be bored by books too.
Years ago I started consuming dozens of books a year. I eventually realised most non-fiction are stretched-out pamphlets: one core idea which could fit into a blog post padded with anecdotes until it reaches book length. The overwhelming majority of productivity books—including the ones typically favoured by HN—fall into this category. A better use of time is to look for an online talk the author has given; you’ll get all the book’s important information faster without the fluff.
Books get boring too. Until you start to develop an eye for quickly identifying the duds so you can abandon them early (or not get them at all). When in doubt, the 2-star GoodReads reviews will typically spell out if a book suffers from too much fluff.
All this to say I don’t think it’s a “books VS blog posts” matter, there’s a ton of garbage in both mediums. Perhaps you’ve just read fewer books than blog posts. If you’re happier with books now, enjoy it.
(I’ve excluded fiction from the conversation because I imagine you’re not talking about blog posts with short stories.)
Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books
#50I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense. I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an…
Every medium has its gold nuggets. A lot of podcasts are garbage, even amongst the ones with interesting topics -- nothing more than a few bros hanging out and improvising on a topic with a little preparation. There are some very high quality podcasts in the mix, and the same is true of non-fiction books.