Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books

It's a big issue because "There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe." - Forbes.

You aren't going to preview / skim literally millions of books which exist to find the ones worth reading. You can't.

I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years

That's, what, 8 hours worth of book publishing in the USA, in 6 years?

The problem I see with these rules is that you're only going to read new books.

I use a heuristic that the best book about a given topic was most likely written half as long ago as people have been thinking about that topic. People write more books now, but they get less interested in old topics as time goes by, and those effects tend to cancel out.

I clearly stated:

> in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it

Meaning that there would be no actual trade-off in the time invested for you, to take a slightly less superficial approach when evaluating books.

To compare the approach I proposed to a literally impossible task of evaluating every single book ever written (as if anybody would actually even be interested in reading all that) is quite disingenuous. This entire HN thread and article are already excluding most books in existence anyway, by the simple fact that everyone here has been mostly talking about "english non-fiction" books specifically. They may still tally up to a large number, but there's no point in exaggerating their quantity when we're all still just as hopeless in trying to read them all anyway. All you did by pointing out this impossibility is just needlessly restate the obvious, and has nothing to do with what I said.

I'm already more than satisfied with the amount of books I read, and get a lot out of them without experiencing any existential anguish over it, so I don't understand why you're trying to throw my reading habits back at me as if they're "not good enough" or something all of a sudden. Or is that what reading is about these days? a mere measuring contest? Am I supposed to feel ashamed I didn't meet some internet stranger's arbitrary criteria for a habit that's supposed to benefit me? I proposed a viable alternative for evaluating books that works more efficiently for me than the one presented in the article, in case others are unsatisfied with their current reading habits. I didn't claim it was something that was going to win you the "reading olympics". If anything, I clearly supported the opposite by emphasizing that people should feel less obligated to finish the books they start, because feeling like you have to finish them is just going to cause needless anxiety about the way you've invested your time.

Besides, who cares if your entire lifetime of reading could've been published in a day? Is your goal in life to out-pace authors and publishers, or is it to get fulfillment out of books? Because in my experience, reading a single chapter out of a bad/mediocre book is a lot more fulfilling than reading a bunch of amazon/goodreads reviews.

I'm actually a fan of dense. If I have to reread a well written paragraph five times to understand that's fine by me. When I'm reading serious non-fiction (currently Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics by Dijkstra and Scholten) I consider it normal to just make it through a handful of pages per day.

I think part of why I didn't enjoy The Lean Startup was because I read it too late. By the time I read it, MVPs, "fail fast", and "make something users want" had been the motto of startups for years, and the points the book was making just seemed obvious. Maybe that wasn't obvious in 2011. (Although Paul Graham's essays have been saying this since at least 2005 and are a much better read IMO.)

But the other part was that it was just poor science, relying almost entirely on anecdotes for its claims. Which is not to say his claims are necessarily wrong, just that for any claim that isn't obviously true, there's no convincing data to back it up. There's usually just one success story where it seemed to work, and even within the story, it's hard to know if the strategy was actually successful. Like, as I mentioned before, the book passes off learning the users preferred teleporting to walking in IMVU as a success story, but it may have in reality been the inferior choice. We can't know for sure, but we do at least know other more successful virtual worlds have walking. IMVU never even tested walking. It undermines his credibility when he seems oblivious to his own possible failures. It's a lot of, "this is what we did, and I think it worked out well". Despite advocating split testing, he never split tested the techniques he advocated. There's no control - no baseline to compare to.

Or when he prefaces the chapter on small batches with a third-hand story of a father and two daughters who had to address, stuff, and seal a stack of envelopes. The daughters, aged 6 and 9, felt it would be faster to address them all first, then stuff them all, then seal them all. The father thought it would be faster to do them one at a time. So they each took half the envelopes and the father won.

I enjoy stories, but a 3rd hand anecdote about a father stuffing envelopes faster than two children is just... why? That's not going to convince anyone. He then calls back to this example several times when explaining how to apply this at a software startup (release frequent small updates, use continuous deployment). But even if one-at-a-time envelope stuffing is faster, and the startup advice is right, one does not imply the other. Just cite an actual study, or do an analysis of what was successful at other companies.