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Ask HN: Are a lot of books just useless?

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Re: Ask HN: Are a lot of books just useless?

#51
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every medium has creation and consumption costs, and it affects their average quality. Books have a high creation cost: both in time and money, relative to electronic mediums. They also have a high consumption cost, as you cant read a book in a few seconds like you can watch shortform content. These factors select for quality.

You could say the same for TV or film and most of it is still garbage.

True, but their cost is still relatively cheaper considering the profit you can make from them is more than from books. Part of this is also because they are easier to replicate.

Re: Ask HN: Are a lot of books just useless?

#53

I think you are focusing too much on the negative side of a book you find useless. There is another framing that is more useful and helps to suggest answers to your other questions. One way to think of it to kind of get an intuition for why things tend to be long is to imagine you are going to have someone be your personal trainer for a month. However, they must interview for the job. One interview question you could…

Textbooks used by serious institutions will be a stronger usefulness heuristic than Goodread stars if you aren't looking for fluff, but are looking for meaningful text. They passed the interview in a literal sense. Particularly ones that are used for years.

Re: Ask HN: Are a lot of books just useless?

#54
If you are an author of a book on a subject, even if it's not great, your resume gains a lot of value.

Also, YMMV, but for me, repetition in books causes to remember much more, shape and use the knowledge. Unlike a random blog post from HN ;)

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