
By Quitting Social Media You Could Read 200 Books a Year - elorant
https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books/
======
tiborsaas
Sounds like this old joke:

\---

There’s an old story about a guy taking a smoke break with his non-smoking
colleague.

“How long have you been smoking for?” the colleague asks.

“Thirty years,” says the smoker.

“Thirty years!” marvels the co-worker. “That costs so much money. At a pack a
day, you’re spending $1,900 a year. Had you instead invested that money at an
8% return for the last 30 years, you’d have $250,000 in the bank today. That’s
enough to buy a Ferrari.”

The smoker looked puzzled.

“Do you smoke?” he asked his co-worker.

“No.”

“So where is your Ferrari?”

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
8% return, good one.

~~~
overcast
Average return over the last 30 years for S&P500 is nearly 7%, now add in all
of those reinvested dividends.

~~~
lm28469
And subtract the tax(es) depending on where you live.

~~~
overcast
Really depends on the investment vehicle. My HRA(pre/post), and Roth(post) are
cranking tax free.

------
dustincoates
This seems wildly inflated.

> Reading 200 books a year isn’t hard at all.

I don't spend much time on social media, and I read maybe 30 to 50 books a
year. My wife, a huge reader, will read around 90 this year. Maybe if we gave
up our creative, athletic, or social pursuits we could get those numbers up to
200, but what's the point?

> Typical non-fiction books have ~50,000 words

I recently finished writing a book, and it was around 125,000 words. In the
end, it felt short when I held it in my hands. I doubt highly the 50,000
number.

> The main reason this happens is a failure to execute.

The main reason people don't read 200 books a year, really, is because there's
not much value in reading that many. If you're reading for enjoyment, slow
down and enjoy it. If you're reading to learn something, slow down and
internalize it. If you're reading to show off, just read the Wikipedia
summaries because no one really cares that you've read a ton of books.

~~~
reallydontask
I've read an average of a book per week for the past 12 years or so.

I probably read/listen for 1 hour each weekday and about 2 hours each day on
the weekend.

200 would require around 30-40 hours of reading time per week, so it's
possible I suppose, but unlikely.

~~~
libertine
This may sound like a dumb question, but how much do you think you retain and
take with you from each book through out a year?

I know it will depend on the book, if it's a book to entertain or a technical
book... but sometimes I get the feeling that so little is retained it's almost
unproductive in the long term simply because you will forget a lot of it.

I have books that stuck with me, that changed my perception, but those are a
really small fraction, and probably had to re-read them to get some details if
I wanted to talk about that book to someone for example.

Do you take notes? If so, do you revisit those notes?

~~~
Vomzor
Not an answer to your question but seems fitting to share it:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/know.html)

------
S_A_P
My question is this- Would reading 200 books per year make you better off than
whatever social media you read? I probably only read a handful of books every
year, but I read hundreds if not thousands of HN linked articles. I think
there is some sort mystique around books like they magically are all sound,
enlightened content and other forms of reading are junk food for the brain.

OK, skimmed the article- The central theme appears to be that you are rotting
your brain for wasting time on social media. What if instead of social media
you read 200 erotic romance novels, are you better off?

~~~
dawg-
Descartes wrote that reading great books is like having a conversation with
the greatest minds who have ever lived - and even at that, hearing only the
absolute best of their thinking.

I think it's a matter of filters. On Twitter where there is almost no filter,
you will be reading almost exclusively garbage. You may just be better off
reading erotic romance novels than reading unfiltered Twitter. HN is a little
more tightly filtered, the quality of stuff posted is generally higher, and
it's probably more worth your time.

But it's hard to beat hundreds or thousands of years of filtering through the
best thoughts of the best minds. When you pick up the plays of Sophocles or
the writings of Cicero you know that people from radically different societies
and ages of history have found wisdom and insight in their thoughts. So I
think there is some "magic" in books in that they have had time to age, and
that thousands of very smart people have found value there.

~~~
ken
Devil's advocate:

I read some Plato earlier this year, and I confess I was unimpressed. I had
always been taught that he was a great philosopher, but apparently his
philosophy was: if you don't know something, just make it up, in exquisite
detail. I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, except how much the
ancient Greeks loved mathematical purity, and didn't have the scientific
method.

What we know in modern terms from modern books _is_ the best thoughts of the
best minds filtered down through the ages. I don't need to read the rough
drafts.

~~~
dawg-
Fair enough, I'm just glad you put forth the effort and then came to your own
conclusions about what you read instead of thinking what everyone told you to
think.

Your observation that the Greeks didn't have "the" scientific method is, to
me, what makes them so very interesting and what made their thought so
original. Plato was one of the very first people writing down his answers to
the question "How do we know things?", which is the same question that the
scientific method tries to answer. You can trace his ideas throughout history
and it's really astonishing to think about. Plato's thought heavily influenced
early Christian theology, then you move on to people like St. Augustine and
St. Thomas Aquinas, who influenced the monastic orders where some of the first
properly "modern" scientific experimentation began taking place in the middle
ages and we move on to the Enlightenment from there. I think the value of
reading the guy who started all that speaks for itself.

If you don't believe me, there is always Alfred North Whitehead's famous quote
to the effect that all of Western philosophy is essentially a series of
footnotes on Plato.

~~~
ken
Some "footnotes"! Yes, I agree that "original" would be an apt description.

Plato: Fire is obviously made of tiny tetrahedrons, because it feels sharp and
stabby when you touch it, and tetrahedrons also have sharp points, QED.†

† Everyone else, after Chemistry: OK so that didn't turn out to be true _at
all_.

~~~
dawg-
Yes, Original, exactly! Original denotes something very powerful, a beginning
which sets things off, which branches off into a bunch of other things that
are only iterations of that first thing. You can draw a line through history
from the ancient Greek philosophers, who in your view were so ignorant as not
to deserve any consideration, directly to the first chemist who discovered
what fire is actually made of.

Maybe Plato's hypothesis about fire was incorrect, but you don't think it
prompted the next guy to try and find a better answer? And then the next guy,
and so on? You don't see any value in knowing where we have all come from
intellectually?

------
lm28469
Never understood the "you should read X hundred books per year" trend.
Especially when the reason is "Warren buffet said so". It's like thinking only
wearing grey t-shirts will make you the next Zuckerberg, and there is no way
you'll be internalising even 5% of 500 books per year. Do something you find
truly meaningful/fulfilling with your time is a better alternative imho.

~~~
dawg-
The whole practice of counting how many books you read is ridiculous. I
recently read Don DeLillo's Underworld. It's 850 pages long and some sections
can be kind of a slog. But it was one of the most satisfying books I've ever
read. It took me 4 months to get through it. Am I really worse off because I'm
reading at a pace of 3 books per year vs. someone who reads 100 trashy self-
help or empty business-speak "thought leader" books per year? Probably not.

~~~
jriot
I've read one Don DeLiio book, White Noise. There are other works on myself of
his that I intend to read as thoroughly enjoyed White Noise.

Though more to your point I recently finished Mathias Enard's Zone - three
months to read. It is 517 pages long, one sentence, a stream of thought. A
difficult book to say the least, as the topic, dealing with not only the
melancholy of the narrator's life but how his theme has remained the same for
thousands of years. Zone will have a lasting impact on my ideological outlook
for the remainder of my life.

As a break from hard topics, I am now reading How to Listen to Jazz, as an
avid jazz listener.

------
syntaxless
I stopped using social media fairly early on but it wasn’t until recently that
I started to replace that time with books. The first year I thought I’d set an
easy goal of 6 books. I read 32. Once I started reading I wanted to continue
reading. I’m close to 50 books so far this year and my life has been
considerably more hectic than last year.

Side Note: Check out your local library and download Libby/Overdrive/Hoopla.
You’ll have access to tons of books/magazines/audiobooks/movies for free. They
even buy books I request on occasion!

~~~
prepend
I also like the limitation of selecting what’s available via my library’s
Overdrive.

------
kilo_bravo_3
I don't think 200 books, or 400 for that matter, would replace the joy I
receive sharing funny cat pictures with my kids and chatting with my grandma
about recipes and paint colors for my house remodeling project on social
media.

~~~
DennisP
Sounds like you use social media in positive ways, instead of, say, scrolling
endlessly, checking how many likes you have, and having unproductive political
arguments with casual acquaintances.

------
jyriand
Logistical part of reading 200 books a year seems like a bigger challenge than
actually reading the books. I'm not sure I could find 200 good books to read.
Basically I would have to find new books at the same rate I read them. Also, I
would probably have to pre-order a month worth of books and find a place to
store them after I have finished reading. Then, of course, I could go to
library, but that takes a lot of time, given that I'm reading most of my free
time. Seems like a headache and I need to hire a personal secretary who would
provide me with a steady stream of good books. EDIT: Just realized that there
already might be some kind of service, that does just that. If not, it might
be a good business idea.

~~~
cafard
In some cities, you can use the library as this service. They will store the
books before and after you read them, and often they will provide suggestions.

~~~
nacs
Or the modern equivalent -- a Kindle tablet.

If you have Amazon Prime they even give you a selection for free and then
theres Kindle Unlimited, a subscription that lets you rent a ton more books.

------
rwcarlsen
As a parent, I rarely have time in chunks larger than a few minutes before
being interrupted by children needing a drink, drawing on the wall with
permanent marker, or escaping the house and running toward the road. It's not
just about how _much_ time we have, but how it is discretized. Not doing
social media for some people equates to having several 5 minute chunks of time
throughout the day doing nothing instead of doing something. Maybe they would
be better off just meditating, but reading books this way doesn't really work
for me at least.

~~~
thrower123
This is one of the reasons I love audible. Driving to and from work is
probably the single biggest uninterrupted chunk of time I get to myself,
unless I stay up late at night. For whatever reason, I can multitask driving
and listening, so I can listen to a couple of books a month that way.

I used to listen to sports radio to fill that time, but the local station has
fired all their decent on-air talent, so I guess, thanks Entercom?

------
acollins1331
I was thinking about this last night and how I'm glad I don't read so many
books. It seems like it would be hard to internalize a lot of the story. I
used to read a lot more, and can think fondly on many of the books I read but
cannot recall most plot details etc. Taking time to read a book, a few weeks,
gives you time to digest it and ponder some of what it's saying, and create
some long term memories as well! Gorging yourself on hundreds of books a year
is probably only marginally better than doing the same with TV shows.

------
drewbt
How many edx courses from top universities could you do in the same amount of
time?

Perhaps a balance between the two.

Binge watch?

How about binge development.

It is definitely worth focusing on quality rather than quantity.

Personally I have found hacker news to be a highly valuable resource over the
past few years. Many books I have read, and interesting topics I have looked
into have come from all of your posts, comments and recommendations.

The signal to noise ratio is among the best on the web that I have encountered
thus far.

------
namanyayg
Article is just blogspam for their dubious "habit coach" service, contains
multiple affiliate links to the same.

Rest of the article seems to be fluff, as another commentor pointed out the
author estimates 2 hours per book. That's laughable.

Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about
retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading
non-fiction. I'm trying to experiment with the Zettelkasten method (posted on
HN a few days ago) to see if that works.

~~~
akman
>Regardless of the fact if it's even possible to read that quickly, what about
retaining and revising what you learnt? Especially important if you're reading
non-fiction.

Exactly this. # of books as a goal seems like a poor choice of metric. But
perhaps readers new to books have to start somewhere that's easy to measure,
even if it's not a great metric.

------
stepvhen
The author's math works out to a bit over 2 hours a book. I assume this was
elided because thats wild to expect.

I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books,
with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.

For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on
size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a
moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually
sounds right. But most books are longer than that.

------
chasing
> To read 200 books, simply spend 417 hours a year reading.

I mean, if you're blazing through books without really paying attention to
them or thinking about them, sure. But I'm not sure the point of reading is to
flip through pages as quickly as possible.

Also, there's nothing intellectually holy about books. They can be just as
much of a waste of time as social media or TV. Whatever media you're
consuming, the point should be to be mindful about it. Not to optimize for
some pointless metric.

------
puranjay
This is such a strange argument. We didn't have social media 20 years back. We
still weren't reading 200 books every year then.

------
steve1977
By quitting reading 200 books a year, you could actually get stuff done ;)

~~~
flareback
I laughed at this.

------
ken
> It was Dec. 2014. I’d found my dream job. Some days, I would be there,
> sitting at my dream job, and I would think, “My god what if I’m still here
> in 40 years? I don’t want to die like this…”

Far be it for me to tell anyone how to analyze their own life, but if this is
your reaction to your "dream job", isn't it _possible_ it's not actually your
dream job?

When someone says their partner is the man/woman of their dreams, they never
follow it up with "My god, what if we're still together in 40 years? I don't
want to die with them..."

------
alexm920
The author lays it out as simple math, but I take issue with several of the
assertions. First, that we all read content of all types at the same speed -
namely our maximum words-per-minute. I've recently been handed a book far
outside my area of training (I'm a scientist, the book is philosophy and
cultural critique), and often I find myself re-reading a sentence or stopping
to dig up context on terminology. I'm sure if I was simply taking in the
sequence of words at maximum speed, I'd finish the book much more quickly, but
I wouldn't be getting anything out of it. Secondly, the author is incredibly
dismissive of non-book media (they mention television, but it may be my habits
that bias me toward grouping blog posts and essays in with "social media"
since they both happen in my phone-to-face space). It's true, engaging with a
single author on a focused topic over many pages has unique advantages, but
not everything worth being exposed to requires that level of involvement. Some
of the best reading I've encountered this year has been short fiction and
essays, almost always online. Also, others have noted it, "books" is an overly
general target, there are lots of books that aren't worth the time it takes to
read them. Setting a target of reading so-many books, without any other
qualification, can lead to some strange optimizations (e.g. reading through
dozens of pulpy airport romance novels to pad your total in late December).
I'm not immune to book elitism, I do find I enjoy reading paper more than a
screen for most topics, but the all-caps "TRASH" definitely set off my alarms.

------
flareback
What sort of books are they reading that only has 50,000 words? Lord of the
Rings has over 480,000 words for all 3 books. Harry Potter has over a million
for 7 books. Enders Game has 100,000.

Plus this isn't taking into account that I like to read more technical about
my profession which take me longer.

> The average American reads 200–400 words per minute (Since you’re on Medium,
> I’m going to assume you read 400 wpm like me)

and that assumption is probably a bad assumption. I do tend to read rather
slowly.

~~~
jeena
For some reason I never read books and somehow I even got ma bachelor in
computer science without reading any of the books but just skimming over some
of them.

I find it very tiresome to read books, when I sit down with one and start
reading I have a 60% chance of falling asleep before I'm done with the second
page and a 40% chance that I need to re read the page because I stopped paying
attention and didn't remember what was written there.

When I read the line with 200-400 words per minute I wondered how fast I am
and tested it here:
[https://www.myreadspeed.com/calculate/](https://www.myreadspeed.com/calculate/)

The result: 103 words per minute, it would take me 17 days to read 'The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer' when I would read 60 minutes a day consistently
without re-reading or falling asleep.

Edit: Ok, English is not my first language but I doubt that I'd do better in
any of the other languages I know.

------
honkycat
I was disgusted by myself when I was writing my year in review blog [0] last
year, and discovered I had only read 20 books.

So, I deleted my social media, and at this point I am at around 52 books, plus
a bunch of abandoned books.

Was a great decision. There is no wisdom to be found in social media.

0: ( [https://cresten.pizza/blog/2018-12-16-books-i-read-
in-2018/](https://cresten.pizza/blog/2018-12-16-books-i-read-in-2018/) )

~~~
ticmasta
_this_ is social media, so you're not fully clean yet...

------
readlikeasloth
Warren Buffet stories are like Chuck Norris jokes. Buffet does this, Buffet
does that. Oh well.

I just see a pattern in that story: Save your precious time. Use your
resources in a better way. Be more efficent. Amass more resources (that could
be personal fitness or wealth as well). Here the resource is knowledge. And
they finally turned the quiet nerd realm of reading books in solitude into
competition and sports.

Wondering what you do after year two when having read 400 books. Will you be
able to recite what was in book number 42? And then what? You start a
discussion with your coworkers about Plato or some obscure sociological
theories? You could do that but this might not go anywhere (speaking of
personal experience here).

I guess the idea is to speed read your way through as fast as possible to get
the numbers right. So you can simply throw in some quotes like the article did
with Orhan Pamuk. Why not ambling a bit and enjoying books instead?

------
kyle-rb
I can't find any source for the 200-400 wpm statistic (which the author
assumes everyone is on the high end of). And 50,000 words per book seems low,
especially for an average.

>608 hours on social media

>1642 hours on TV

>Wow. That’s 2250 hours a year spent on TRASH. If those hours were spent
reading instead, you could be reading over 1,000 books a year!

Clearly the author doesn't indulge in this TRASH, so why has he only read 200
books per year? It sounds like he's wasting a whole lot of time, or some of
these numbers are off.

------
hliyan
Does a class of app exist that can chunk set of selected books, texts or
subjects into small, self-contained units and feed them to the user in a daily
twitter-like feed?

------
noonespecial
Skimming social feeds is a very different kind of reading than book reading.
If you spent all that time sprinting could you could also run 300 miles per
week?

------
thanatropism
This N-books-a-year thing sounds shallow to me. The one year I tracked with
Goodreads I clocked at 14, but nowadays I don't target numbers. There are
books I've had open for two years now.

I'm sure I could read 200 graphic novels in a quarter, but I mostly focus on
difficult stuff that tires me at 5-15 pages in. I also read a lot of
interesting and worthwhile stuff online.

Now, I bet I could do 200 push-ups a year.

------
Smithalicious
Yes, yes, read a book a day, Lamborghini in the Hollywood hills, I'm pretty
sure we've been over this already. Jokes aside, this article assumes that you
can read a book in a little over 2 hours, and that you can find 200 books per
year that you'd want to read (and that this takes no time by itself). Both of
those are quite wrong in my experience.

------
linuxftw
Why are people so enamored with books? The only kind of books I read are
technical books, and that's only when the content is not available elsewhere
(or the quality of the content is much higher in a book).

What free education content on youtube for whatever your interest is (other
than programming, most of that sucks on youtube).

------
ryanmcbride
I love reading and I'm not overly fond of social media but this smacks so
heavily of "kids these days".

------
bigred100
I don’t buy it. I scroll on hacker news or send my friends nonsense when I’m
too tired/unfocused to read a book. The time isn’t interchangeable. I
generally read 50-80min per day depending on how busy I am. If work is easy at
that period add another 30min of studying technical material on my own time.

------
futureproofd
I'm currently reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and it's quite lengthy
at 1300+ pages. Not only that, but there are some interesting digressions
along the way, some which have gotten me interested in very basic cryptography
(or at least the history). For instance:
[https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/about/cryptologic-h...](https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/about/cryptologic-
heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/wwii/german_cipher.pdf)

So I don't see how in a case like this, I could finish this book (and any
related materials of interest) in the allotted time, to reach the goal of 200
books a year. That's just unrealistic.

------
ohduran
The main reason I don't read 200 books a year is because I read good books
frequently, instead of wasting my attention on low quality books and
challenging myself on the number of books I read.

------
sasaf5
No you can't, your brain needs downtime. Stop trying to shame rest.

------
dr-detroit
Of all the reasons to avoid so called social media this is probably the worst.
How about the fact that the average person creates unoriginal and bad content
or the fact that 99.9% of it is chad and staceys highschool dating simulator
for adults? How about the fact that you've read 1984 and you wouldn't let
someone limit you to grunting in 280 characters. Oh, and the real kicker --
its become a cringy subculture centered around mob mentality, bad behavior,
and shouting down all the other voices as much as possible. Christ! Literally
all of it is tightly controlled by corporations/government that invest
billions in brain research. Give me a break.

~~~
dawg-
The scariest and most prescient part of 1984 turns out to have been the 2
Minutes' Hate. See: China on reddit last week.

~~~
raxxorrax
A perfect balance between 1984 and Brave New World sounds absolutely lovely.

------
sabujp
reading 200 books isn't hard, reading 200 books on technical subjects, math,
science, etc and actually understanding everything is really difficult (at
least initially).

------
pcurve
One book a month is a good start for mortals like myself

~~~
derstander
One or two books a month is my target, too. I enjoy reading and, if I don’t
reign in the habit, it will consume all of my free time and begin eating into
time I’ve reserved for other things.

I used to tell myself that reading is a better way to spend my time than
watching movies or TV. But my counterpoint is that it’s still not what I’ve
made plans to do. I’ve found that limiting long-form reading to several hours
a week is still enough time to get through one or two books a month.

And when I read excessively, I’ll browse my library’s currently available
books until I find something. That’s in contrast with now, when I decide to
read a particular book and then wait for it to become available. Though I do
carry a “to-read” list and there’s usually one of those available at any given
time.

------
yoz-y
I think glancing at HN or Twitter is more passable at work between compiles. A
book read in such snippets would be just wasted.

------
mclightning
You must be on Social Media at medically dangerous levels for same time to
accomodate for 200 books, or those are all booklets

------
mantoto
I read enough books. Books are not better then anything just because they are
books.

------
ulisesrmzroche
“Be a jack of all trades! Read paper books or kindle!”

This is ridiculous even by our standards

------
ReptileMan
Too bad that there aren't written even a fraction of that worth reading.

------
jgalentine007
But then how will everyone be able to know how very smart I am?

------
lone_haxx0r
... Or you could waste your time on HN instead.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
That is a fascinating suggestion! We should rigorously debate its merits
first.

------
scotty79
... but you wouldn't.

