I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

(One trick here is to buy short/small non-fiction books.)

Looking at books to use in class, I'm constantly surprised at how many words they use to convey so few concepts. Teaching is an optimization problem, and if you're optimizing for something else (e.g. making money), the teaching is likely to suffer.

For that reason, you're right on about distrusting blog posts. A lot of them are written in order to make money. Sometimes they also teach.

Not that there's anything wrong with getting paid for your work. I've made a great deal of capitalist money doing various things. But I also believe that I should make my money doing something else, and use that to fund the information-sharing portion of my life.

When it comes to teaching, I don't demand anything from my students or readers. At least not directly--students still pay tuition, and some of that goes to me. But all the ebooks and materials I write are free to use and have no ads and no tracking. The only goal is to teach as efficiently as possible, and no have money enter the picture.

Again, if one wants to make money with your blog or videos or whatever, I'm not judging. My personal ethic prohibits it for me, but of course people are free to do what they want. I just tend to value sites without advertising more than those with.

So I guess I am judging. :)

Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. A lot of the ideas presented in those books could be adequately presented in a 10th of the number of pages.

A huge time-saver has been reading the article versions of stuff that has been turned into a book. You get the same points, but in minutes instead of hours.

A book is just long-form writing. Other than its length, a book is fundamentally no different than any other form of written communication. There are bad books just as there are bad blog posts.

Length can be an important differentiator, for sure. But I don't ever see that as the topic of conversation. Only book vs blog vs tweet. Be more specific.

Rather than just say "books" you should say which ones.

If Alex Jones writes a book, it doesn't suddenly become better than when I see a cut up Noam Chomsky interview on TikTok. Just because Jones has more room to write his nonsense doesn't mean it is better than Chomsky dropping truth bombs inside of 15 seconds.