
Why can’t we read anymore? - subnaught
https://medium.com/@hughmcguire/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-503c38c131fe
======
Schwolop
Part of the problem is articles like this. There were perhaps five interesting
sentences of content in that entire piece, and several hundred entirely
redundant words and personal examples used only to set the tone.

If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience, is it any wonder
some of that audience hasn't the attention span to stick with it?

Older, serious, and timeless literature requires deep concentration because
the authors use their thousands of words to express deep pathos that can't be
trivialised. It takes practice to commit oneself to a book like that for long
enough to get into a flow wherein it can be understood and appreciated. It's
_easier_ to read fluff because the dopamine hits quicker, but (for some
people) it's worth the effort to read something more meaningful.

In some ways there's an analogy to coding; some books I can't read unless I've
got the time to be isolated from distractions. Similarly, some coding problems
I can't make progress unless I know I've got more than a half hour to pre-load
my brain cache.

Given that I'm railing about redundant words, this seems an appropriate point
to stop.

~~~
klipt
> If modern writers have such disrespect for their audience

As opposed to whom, paid-by-the-word Dickens and his amazing menagerie of
circumlocutions? ;-)

~~~
panglott
Perhaps, but the further back you go, the starker the shift in reading habits
becomes. I skimmed this article in 5 minutes and probably won't remember it
tomorrow. Compare two centuries ago, when the only books most people had were
the Bible and Milton, and they memorized every word. Or three centuries before
that, when the people who could read might have to travel across Europe to
read a particular book, and might commit each page to a memory palace.

------
jasode
I've read over 500 fiction books and 2000+ non-fiction. I've read many of the
big thick classics like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Infinite Jest. I've kept a
spreadsheet of all the books I've read somewhat like Art Garfunkel[1] (of
Simon & Garfunkel music duo).

I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the
web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.

With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form
books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't
say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing
out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks
without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not
ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head
down another rabbit hole.)

15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today
get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching
youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++
to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in
1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.

Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to
non-book forms of consuming words.

[1][http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html](http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html)

[2][http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-
Brains/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-
Brains/dp/0393339750/)

~~~
Retra
Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other
areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-
read what I feel like I've just read. This isn't just an internet-fueled lack
of attention, it's how I've always read, and how I image most people read most
of the time.

The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate
thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. It is lazier, maybe. It's
probably not great if you want to learn something in depth and stay focused on
it for long periods of time.

~~~
jader201
_" I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just
read."_

This is me.

 _" and how I image most people read most of the time."_

I wish I knew if this were true. I've always felt that I have some sort of
"disorder" or some form of ADHD or something that causes my mind to wander
anytime I try to read a book. I'm a terribly slow reader for this reason (at
least when it comes to books -- internet articles, for some reason, don't seem
to have this same effect on me), and as a result, I've not read too many books
at all. I mostly get my information in smaller bursts.

Come to think of it, whenever I see what I consider super long articles posted
on HN, and a ton of discussion about how great the article was, I feel
terribly inadequate that I can't read said article in less than an hour (or
more). Short articles I'm fine with, it's the longer ones -- and books -- that
I struggle with.

And it's certainly not the result of any "conditioning" from reading short
internet articles all the time -- I've been like this since long before the
era of blogs and HN.

Would love it if someone could shed some light on this.

~~~
noir_lord
Not for me, when I read I get lost in the book and it gets dark outside, the
cats come and sleep on me, the street lights go on and I look up at 10pm and
I've read half a novel.

It's a sense of peace I get from few other things in life.

~~~
sukilot
This, or even watching a slow paced movie (the kind more common before 1990)
is incredibly refreshing break from the modern distraction filled world.

~~~
jmccree
As I've gotten older and have less free time and there's so much more content
out there, one practice I've come to accept is reading the wikipedia page and
plot synopsis for a book/movie before starting watching something. In the same
way I read HN comments before deciding whether to read the original article
often times. Before wikipedia I would read the last chapters of books first.

I'm more worried about my time being spoiled than the plot being spoiled, and
after all a good movie/book is even better the 2nd time around. This has
allowed me to commit to watching or reading things I never would have before
as I'd get bored (read: worried this is a waste of my time) 10 minutes into a
slow moving movie.

~~~
Tycho
But how does just reading the synopsis indicate if something is any good?
Wouldn't you be better just looking at the IMDB score? Or are you looking out
to avoid things with 'dumb' endings?

------
borgchick
I'm honestly a little surprised at some of the comments here. I thought most
people on here would agree that many of us do suffer from this. I mean, how
many of you actually read through the entire article, WITHOUT checking your
email, or flipping to twitter/fb to tell the world about this good article you
just found? I had to really force myself to read the entire article first, and
not give in to that urge to get a hit of dopamine. But of course, YMMV.

I think the ability to concentrate and focus on a single task is going to
become more and more useful, because it is so easy to give in to that
temptation to flip away, just for a quick moment. I've been working on
practicing mindfulness through meditation, and have thought of reading a book
as a form of meditation (nice to see the author allude to that a little).

So your TL;DR: good article, read more books, re-learn how to focus on single
tasking.

~~~
colechristensen
I'm frequently disappointed when I do finish a web-published article to the
point where I don't think there's anything wrong with skipping though most of
them.

Most of them are poorly written or written in a way to make money.

That is

* clickbait titles when the bulk of the information in the article could be summarized in the title instead

* lack of introduction / thesis / abstract at the beginning summarizing or outlining the actual content

* meandering content with no clear overarching goal

* content padding – lots of words addling little information

So why should I feel bad about not finishing things I think aren't worth
finishing?

~~~
rf_guy
I agree here. I began to read the article but the format completely deterred
me from finishing it. I assume the format was on purpose to prevent it from
becoming the very thing that it was saying the people have a hard time
reading. But in the end, at least for me, I had a harder time reading the
choppy, repetitive wording than a well thought out set of paragraphs. I have
read many books and also started many and never picked them back up. There is
no reason to force yourself to read something that does not capture your
attention.

------
Red_Tarsius
> _Last year, I read four books_.

Since January I read +-25 books. It's not necessarily a good thing. Every
book, no matter how short, is a commitment. It requires time and effort you
could spend in other, more productive things. As a matter of fact, reading is
how I procrastinate.

 _The road to mediocrity is paved with good books_ : I've been reading quite a
lot on entrepreneurship... let's say 300 hours worth of reading. I could have
spent that time by testing ideas and hustling, but I lacked confidence. It was
always " _1 more book... and then I 'll start doing it_".

------
tinco
The author conflates two things that are only half related. This sentence is a
big hint to why he's not reading books:

> "And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence number
> five."

Reading books isn't exhausting, you can read books 16 hours per day. If you
fall asleep after reading 5 lines, that means you are dead tired and shouldn't
even have opened that book in the first place.

And maybe the reason why you're too weak to keep yourself from checking your
information sources every 5 seconds during all the other activities you (or
your boss) care about is because you're tired during the day as well.

The author suggests 5 solutions, I think that's a bit extreme. If you just do
3 and 4, you'll get more sleep and everything will probably be better.
Coincidentally that advice is what you'll find everywhere for sleep related
issues: "No computers 2 hours before sleep".

~~~
danneu
All my life, within a chapter of text, I'm either falling asleep or lulling at
the cusp of it.

Moving my body or locations temporarily wards it off like a snooze button, but
the struggle also keeps me from losing myself in a novel. To this day, if you
fast-forwarded a video of me reading on my couch, I'd like look a fish
flopping out of water to stay awake until the next chapter.

My best solution so far has been to read more in the morning with my coffee
before I begin my work, which also happens to be a good time to read in
general: it's before the barrage.

~~~
vlasev
What if you read while standing? Do you have trouble doing other activities
while lying down, like using a computer?

------
brandon272
I read a lot. I just happen to do most of my reading online.

I don't follow the notion that what we read online by default has less value
than what is available to us in books. I have learned a lot from what I've
read online, whether it's long form articles, Wikipedia articles, piecemeal
submissions that make up online forum/community sites or even IRC logs.

The mere fact that something is available in book form is not a guarantee of
it's accuracy nor a guarantee of the author's credibility.

~~~
cortesoft
I don't think the author is arguing that that books are more accurate or more
credible than other forms of writing. What the author is arguing is that books
provide a different sort of experience than those other forms of writing.

------
visakanv
I've memorized a relevant XKCD just for this occasion, because it comes up so
much: [http://xkcd.com/1227/](http://xkcd.com/1227/)

> "Intellectual laziness and the hurry of the age have produced a craving for
> literary nips. The torbid brain... has grown too weak for sustained
> thought." – Israel Zangwill, The Bachelor's Club, 1891

I highly, highly recommend everybody read "The Information: How The Internet
Gets Inside Us" by Adam Gopnik:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-
information](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-information)

It points out how this 'Why can't we X anymore", "in the past it was better",
"the future will be amazing", "the future will be horrible", and "everything
is kinda the same" perspectives have been repeated, remixed, rehashed over and
over again.

~~~
basicallydan
While it does appear that the perspective you're talking about has been
repeated over and over, it's important to recognise that it's a perspective
which applies to whatever time in which it was held. Therefore, it's relative.
Maybe the past _was_ amazing and wonderful, and perhaps _that_ past's past was
even _more_ amazing and wonderful. It's possible things _are_ getting worse
and worse all the time, only society has failed to heed the "warning" of the
doomsayers, leading even greater decline in "wonderfulness".

~~~
Vraxx
Except most of the activities that are cited as "dying" in the late 1800s are
still alive and well. Long walks? Check, still here and valued. Letter
writing? Not as prevalent, but still done. Conversation? Still existent,
despite naysayers in the 1800s and people claiming text is the death of
conversation.

I think the difference people are noticing is that as some things begin to
have an alternative, the minority (or majority) that would prefer said
alternative can now express that desire where it was not possible before. Take
the quote about sitting down and enjoying long meals. Maybe that's not
everybody's cup of tea, but now it's a lot easier to get a quick meal on the
go and some people prefer it.

~~~
therealdrag0
And 2000 years ago people decried writing because it weakened memory.

------
brownbat
I read maybe one book in the last half of 2014. I wasn't proud of this number.
Then I took a trip with only a kindle, no hotspots.

I read nine books in two weeks.

I felt so energized and accomplished. I vowed to keep it up when I returned to
a world with internet.

I have not.

An Internet fast is an interesting experience. People might drop off the grid
for backpacking trips, or trips to monasteries... I think it's legitimate to
drop off and take anything you think might be your hobby but for internet.
Take books, like I did, or maybe a typewriter. Or a musical instrument.
Canvases and paint. A sharp knife and some pieces of wood. Yarn. Give your
mind some idle stretches, a few days without constant distraction. See what
happens, you'll probably be amazed.

------
Htsthbjig
This man should talk for himself.

I am an avid reader. I am part of readers clubs and meetings. I don't see less
people today there than 10 years ago, in fact I see way more(probably
something to do with the economic crisis).

The world does not end because we can read online and distract ourselves. A
person does not need this for distraction, in fact just a fly making noises
around you or thinking on your partner-son-mother while looking at the wall is
enough.

The same was said about TV decades ago, and radio before it, even about books
when it became cheap centuries ago. The Quijote is a book about someone that
reads instead of living and wants to live at the end of his life. At the time
cheap books were a novelty because of the printing press, remember that before
it it took a year to copy a single book.

~~~
droopyEyelids
I'm in your camp. I almost see "hand wringing about attention" as a meme, a
common blogger's trope to stir up concern similar to a trashy evening news
broadcast about "the new way teens are getting high."

Everyone who I knew liked to read while growing up still likes to read. Some
people don't, and thats fine too. What annoys me is people who don't like to
read, but feel like they should, and therefore go looking for a scapegoat. And
something tells me that some people have struggled to read and felt inadequate
about that throughout history.

------
gregrata
I've found the opposite, if you'll allow that eBooks are real books. To me,
it's a golden age of books - with self publishing and eBooks, there are more
books coming out ever day than ever before. I personally read AT LEAST two
books a week (usually not technical - I enjoy sci-fi). I've always been a avid
reader, but generally had to re-read a lot (I have about 5k physical books, to
support that habit). Theses days, I'm ALWAYS reading new books. The selection
is amazing, a lot of the books are very good!

------
yason
One reason I've observed is that the quality of printed text isn't necessarily
that good. I can't not let go of a good book, I'm only bounded by the time of
day and night: if I weren't, I'd read it on one sitting. Or an interesting
textbook that I can't wait to get back to even if it's slow to read because
it's just so interesting.

But there are lots of books that just aren't that good in comparison to really
interesting articles on the internet. There are a even a lot more articles, so
the reader must develop the skill of skimming quickly and deciding early
whether there's any meat in it. But good articles are really good and they're
easy to find. Books that aren't bad and books that are just all right but not
really, truly good can't simply compete: earlier they could because there was
no alternative. But now there is.

Nothing can beat a good book but there's so many other things to read that are
incredibly good too, so the partitioning of our reading time will simply
change.

------
sosuke
Reading takes all of your attention, all of it. I can't have a conversation
while reading a book, I can't watch a movie while reading a book, you have to
be ready to give everything to that book for whatever period of time you want
to read it for.

I am watching Chopped, skimming articles like this one, I just stepped up mid-
typing that last bit to help my wife with something and finally I'm
programming. I was interrupted again after finishing that sentence.

Reading is a luxury.

~~~
calinet6
I think the point is that _attention_ is a luxury.

These days, the currency is attention. The amount of attention required for
reading of any substance is very high, and with thousands of apps, sites,
shows, brands, and everything else pulling at us in a way that's engineered to
be ideally visceral and tailored to our animal impulses, the lack of attention
left over is no surprise.

------
arihant
Hard to see problem with this behavior. It is the same reason we don't ride
horses to work anymore - better stuff available.

We didn't read at all, then we read leaves, then we read scrolls, then we read
books, now we read the internet. Books have been around for extremely small
percentage of our species' span. Moreover before the internet, the general
public showed more interest in reading up more current affairs/entertainment
than traditional books. Newspapers and magazine numbers are still strong.

Frankly, I would rather have a race of people reading up on general knowledge
and keep themselves aware than a race of people wasting time trying to read
story books just to fit in. It is not that the books have been replaced.
Better stuff has brutally shown that books were truly appealing to only a few.
If, given chance, most people flea, it is a failed product.

~~~
coldtea
> _Hard to see problem with this behavior. It is the same reason we don 't
> ride horses to work anymore - better stuff available._

Only in this case we abandoned cars for hoping along barefoot on one foot
while wearing a diving suit...

> _Frankly, I would rather have a race of people reading up on general
> knowledge and keep themselves aware than a race of people wasting time
> trying to read story books just to fit in._

We have that former thing, and its producing a race of people who have no
understanding of anything substantial, be it politics, world affairs or arts,
and jump from BS celebrity tweet to twerking videos.

Of course one can resort to the classic "People have always complained about
new technologies and trends, hence there's no problem with them".

For one, "people always complained about new technologies" is not such an
obvious and true fact -- how many people and how seriously complained is not
measured, nor is their reasoning examing. We're just given some examples of
people complaining for some new technology/trend, and are told that all those
examples are of equal zero validity, just "get off of my line" kind of
affairs).

Second, even if "people always complained about new technologies" that doesn't
automatically mean that they were always wrong (nor is proof offered, besides
"and yet, those technologies stayed with us and we now are ok with them" as if
that proves anything qualitatively).

A more nuanced approach would have been to check whether something was indeed
lost (a tradeoff) in adopting those technologies, something that we could
maybe preserve if we adopted them with less abandon.

And in fact a lot of our subsequent behavior --which is usually ommited when
glorifying technology-- points to that (e.g. the adoption of cars lead to huge
cities built around driving like L.A., which we now find less than great. Or
the city noises and environment led to a flight for the suburbs. Examples are
numerous).

------
officemonkey
It's a skill. But unlike riding a bike, if you don't use it, you lose it. On
the other hand, if you practice, it gets better.

I started keeping track of my reading in 2011. Here's my history:

    
    
        2011: 11 books     
        2012: 16 books     
        2013: 29 books     
        2014: 54 books     
        2015: 26 books (to date)
    

I did this while not significantly changing my lifestyle. How?

    
    
        1. I read to and from work. 45 min each way.   
        2. I read at lunch. 1 hr.  
        3. I chose reading instead of watching TV or playing video games.   
        4. I use eReaders, so I have dozens of books to read next.  
        5. I log my reading (obsessively?) on goodreads.com.
    

One thing I didn't do: I don't even try to read before bed. If I'm lucky, I
get three pages read and then I'm nodding off.

"Why can't we read anymore?" I dunno. Maybe because _you_ aren't reading
anymore.

~~~
will_work4tears
Logging what you read is, oddly enough, a new idea for me. One I'll have to
seriously consider doing. In 2003 I started college, and an exercise in a
class I had we had to tell two truths and one falsehood and let the class
guess the falsehood. I don't remember what the falsehood was or the other
truth, but the truth one that everybody thought was the falsehood was that I
had read over 2000 books.

I only know that I read that many because I owned that many books (and didn't
own every book I ever read). I was 26 then, and reading since 5-6, so that's
really only 10 books a year. The real number of books at that point might have
been more like 3000 - but I did re-read a lot of the books I owned so maybe
not.

Since this time last year, I've probably read 30+ books. Gotta love the Kindle
and Kindle Unlimited.

~~~
officemonkey
10 books/yr x 20 years = 200, not 2,000.

Setting up a goodreads account is simplicity itself. And since it's owned by
Amazon, you can import all your books with a click. There's also a bookmarklet
that "Adds book to Goodreads" from the Amazon page.

Once you get used to logging progress and marking completed books, you will
really see the pages and books mount up.

~~~
will_work4tears
Oops, you are right. I'd say I hadn't had my coffee yet when I wrote that, but
even that's not a good excuse. How embarassing. 100 books does seem right
though, I thought the 10 seemed a little too light.

I set up an account yesterday and did like that Amazon import feature. I wish
It imported all the books you read with Kindle Unlimited though. Thanks for
the heads up with the bookmarklet, I'll check it out.

------
WA
_Last year, I read four books._

Last year, I read 25 books. And the year before, too. And the year before.
Then I stopped reading this blog post.

The number of books is a weak benchmark, because I read books as thin as 100
pages up to 1,300 pages. I read blog posts that have 50 pages and some that
have 140 characters.

Reading is enjoyable, but still a form of consumption. There are only so many
ideas per week you can think a lot about and thus, you can read only so many
books that really benefit your life and make you change your mindset.

------
calinet6
This is an amazing article, if you get to the heart of it (though be warned,
that requires actually reading it).

One of the amazing insights: _new information is a drug._ It causes a dopamine
rush. The influx of all this new information, alerts, everything tugging at us
every day is the new legal high, and we're all addicted, with thousands of
external entities profiting off the act, dealing out notifications.

I highly recommend reading it fully!

------
davidgerard
This is a terrible article of the variety "I do something therefore everybody
does something": typical mind fallacy on crack, nary an actual numerical
statistic to be seen.

I mean, I could play anecdote wars (I read ridiculous numbers of books now I
have FBReader on my phone) but that would be feeding the foolishness.

~~~
jayvanguard
That is my take as well. Vague allusions to current research but no hard
cites. Seems like recycled trope of "modern life is too busy and our brains
are rotting".

I read a great excerpt from something published in the 1800s complaining about
the same thing... I'll have to dig it up.

~~~
jayvanguard
[https://xkcd.com/1227/](https://xkcd.com/1227/)

There they are... see 1894 and 1895 in particular.

------
rwc
I believe one of the problems with digitally minded brains tackling books is
opportunity cost.

In a blog post, a tweet, or email I can quickly decide if it's worth my time
-- does it pique interest, make me feel more connected to the world.

With a book, the investment of time and energy is much greater for an
uncertain (but perhaps marvelously more meaningful) payoff.

------
tarequeh
This is a difficult problem a lot of us face. I personally have a habit of
glancing through hundreds of articles that pop in my RSS reader everyday.
Often after reading a handful of those articles, some of them providing
certain bits and pieces of knowledge, I feel like it would have been better to
focus on a single topic and learn more about it. That's where I miss books.
Although I have many of them sitting in the shelf right next to me, it has
become more difficult for me in the recent years to pick one up and start
reading. I think it's time for a change. Thanks OP for sharing this.

~~~
rwc
One of the great tests for me personally is can I even remember the last 10
headlines or articles I read? The dopamine hit is in the discovery, not
necessarily the comprehension.

------
Animats
Because the layout on medium.com, which purports to be a "long form" site for
people who read, is for short-attention-span people. Scroll through the
article linked. It's painful.

------
nemexy
His points are mostly true, at least for some people, but I think we should go
deeper than that. There are people who hate reading tech books and prefer to
get the information in concise/shorter way through internet/SO. I am one of
them, I have tried reading different software engineering books(widely
recommended ones), but I just can't get into them. And yet I can easily digest
an article about specific issue I have, try it out and if it works the article
goes into my Pocket so I can check it again in the future, if something
similar happens.

But give me a good fantasy novel, I will devour it. Wheel Of time (13 x 700
pages) was completed in 3 months. Chronicles of Amber? Done. ~60 books of
Pratchett, a lot of them multiple times? Done. Tolkien? Done. There were
countless of times, where I couldn't sleep before finishing a book, staying up
to 4-5 am, when I usually go to sleep around 23-24:00. That's why I feel it is
really hard to start a book, when you don't know what type of books you like.
Some people enjoy fantasy/sci-fi/romance/action/prose and many more. Maybe
something non-fiction? And I feel that schools should somehow help students
discover their favourite authors and their favourite ganres.

Good article, but he could have given his point in one/third of the content
length and it wouldn't have lost anything.

------
bsder
Well, I simply find that concentration takes _practice_. And we simply don't
practice it much anymore.

I also think that we have forgotten that the point of email and text messaging
was so that we could be asynchronous, rather than interrupt driven like a
phone call.

------
eskimo87
I couldn't even finish reading this long article. Just a para or two, after
that simply skimmed through till end. :-(

~~~
alexashka
Meh, I think it's fine.

What is he/she really saying?

There's a thousand and one problems one could be solving in his/her life.
Checking twitter/facebook less often and reading words printed on paper is
priority number 356 for me. I don't know why it ranks so high for the author
to warrant a blog post.

The real issue is not having your priorities straight that you are worrying
about your allocation of time/resources. Surely there's bigger fish to fry in
your own life - where's the blog post on that?

------
coliveira
The difference between books and Internet articles is depth. A good book can
take you from knowing nothing to a relatively deep understanding of a topic --
by nature of its format. Consider for example one of the classic books of all
time: Newton's Principia. You can start reading that book with just a basic
knowledge of geometry, and in a couple hundred pages later you'll know more
about physics then you ever thought possible. And that book was presenting
physics _for the first time!_ That's not something you can replicate with
Internet articles. It would be much more trouble to do that over the Internet,
and you would cry "please, write a book and send it to me so I can read all
this information in a easier way". Other books are like that, not only in
science but also in literature, philosophy, computing (e.g.: TAOCP) and so
many other areas.

The problem we have nowadays is that, because it became so much easier to
write books, we have more and more books that don't add much to human
knowledge. In the old times, writing and publishing a book was hard, which
meant that the threshold for acceptance was much higher. Our society views
this downgrading of book quality as a sign that books are not a good format,
when in fact this is just an unintended consequence of our technology.

------
netcan
I think the changes are inherent to interactivity and the infinite volume of
the internet. These change everything. Once you can respond, you are a part of
the fray and your thinking changes.

When you read an interesting nonfiction book today, you can also check
wikipedia, listen to podcasts, watch the author giving a Ted talk and jump
into the infinite sea of informal online commentary.

IE, reading on HN is not reading in the sense that reading some book in 1991
was. It's being in a conversation, for better and worse. Your mind is
operating in a different context.

I also think that writing is adapting more slowly than reading. Many
nonfiction books I find interesting are 250-400 pages when they could be under
100 and just as effective. I think that's some side effect of paperback books
published by the publishing industry, the medium and its economic ecosystem.

In any case, if you want to maintain reading of that kind as a habit or
pursuit, you need to create an environment for it. Have a reading room in your
house, go to a cafe or park or your garden and read there. Set and setting.
You also need to be somewhat honest about what you like and how. Are you so
engrossed that you read for 3hrs when you meant to read for 30min? Are you
doing something that you need to discipline yourself into doing?

------
gumby
I don't know if the author can reasonably conflate the issues he does. I often
(but not always -- perhaps 50/50) "fail" to listen to a song all the way
through -- but I really only did that in the album, cassette and CD days
because the tech sucked. Now I can easily jump to the part I want, just
listening to i.

I only listen to podcasts when trapped on a long drive. Them I tend to listen
to end-to-end again because the tech sucks.

I've always found it hard to sit and watch a film, or even a youtube video,
linearly. It's generally just _way too slow_ (and occastionally too fast) and
I like to be able to skip around. But the tools suck.

 _Books_ , on the other hand, are ideal. In so many I luxuriate in them,
especially fiction which can be so multimedia compared to a film, generally
reading linearly. Others I skip around, skipping over boring bits, coming back
to them, going back to parts I loved, or just reading something interesting
over and over.

It's not that "the digital" caused me to lose my ability to concentrate,
rather it allowed me access to media in a way that _supports_ my enjoyment:
sometimes intense, sometimes casual, and sometimes intense just on the parts
that matter. How can this be bad?

------
khorwitz
Shallows is a great book about this and "what the internet does to our
brains". This chrome extension is supposed to combat the internet's
unquestionable ability to mess with our work focus:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusr/fgdcnfgmneb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/focusr/fgdcnfgmneblnnldmaffhbniomfajlah?hl=en)

------
Nursie
This is interesting, and I have been thinking about this quite a lot recently.

I used to read books by the dozen. Sometimes literally, in about 2006 I
discovered Gollancz/Orion's "Sci-Fi Masterworks" series and was getting
through more than one per week, in addition to holding down a job and having a
pretty active social life.

Now I don't think I've read a book since I motored through my second reading
of the "Song of Ice and Fire" stuff last year.

I, like the author, also find myself putting on some of the best TV there has
ever been, and then doing something else while it's on, like checking email or
facebook, or reading HN. So I don't really absorb it.

I don't want to cut out tv, but I do want to be able to concentrate on it, and
I do want to read more books again. And get control of my sleeping patterns
which have always, always been up the wazoo anyway.

So perhaps I shall join in and try to do as the author of this post has -
start reading, deny the instant-gratification urges and reclaim my brain and
my attention span.

------
codeulike
Distraction might be a problem for some of us, but its important to remember
that people are reading more books now than they ever have at any point in
history, even if you only count paper books and especially if you count
e-books.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-
ne...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-next-time-
someone-says-the-internet-killed-reading-books-show-them-this-chart/255572/)

[http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/05/tech/gaming-
gadgets/e-read...](http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/05/tech/gaming-
gadgets/e-reader-survey-pew-gahran/)

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/krystieyandoli/facts-that-prove-
youn...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/krystieyandoli/facts-that-prove-young-people-
are-reading-more-than-adults#.do18qjKwW)

------
FinnDS
I thought this was well-written, and pretty much spot on for most of us. The
'onto-the-next' part is scarily true for me. I always want to finish
something, so I can continue onto whatever's next. Maybe this is normal.

I know for myself that, when putting something on the television, I'll pop out
my mobile not too much later after, just to check up on things. It's very much
the modern day curse, I think, and we seem to have no real constraint. We get
these positive reinforcements ("Ooh, new e-mail. Ooh, new message from a
friend. Ooh, something new and unknown and exciting.") from constantly not
being present, so that's why we keep doing it.

Personally, I bought myself an e-reader and I already read a full book in a
week or so. I'm not an avid reader, but I love books. The key was, for me at
least, to read one chapter at a time. That way I always got progress each time
I read.

------
Silhouette
It's probably quite a compliment to the author that I did actually read the
whole thing -- about 2,500 words in a little under 15 minutes -- without
switching away, other than a short pause when an e-mail arrived and a
notification message popped up that I had to clear to carry on reading.
Normally these days I find much over 1,000 words or 5 minutes on a screen and
I'm losing concentration.

I don't even use things like Facebook and Twitter, but I do have a habit of
reading the front page of HN/Reddit/whatever and opening a dozen different
interesting-looking discussions and their corresponding articles all at once.
Perhaps this attempt to be a bit more organised is actually more like the
example mentioned in the article, where you're reading something but know you
have a new mail waiting and it knocks 10 points off your effective IQ.

~~~
kiba
I don't get notification messages like you guys, or check my email for such
short rewards.

Instead, I check my email or certain websites for substantial updates to my
favorite fanfic or web serial.

3K words is heavenly.

10K words even more so.

The more words the better. If you can update faster than I can read, that'll
be awesome.

------
delinka
Why I don't read non-technical things very often:

I have "better" (to me) things to do. I want to read about boost. I want to
study LLVM. I want to write code. I want to set up a Linux server running
node.js. I want to compare some NoSQL datastores to an RDBMS or two.

When I want distraction or to rest my brain, I'll take entertainment in short
spans. I really don't want to invest weeks of two-hour nights reading a work
of fiction. I'm not terribly interested in reading someone's biography. And
unless a non-fiction topic is currently meaningful to me (for example, books
about the human mind when I was in my early 20s), then I'm not likely to Just
Read.

I feel like if I Just Read for reading's sake, I'm not honing the craft that's
important to me. I feel like it makes me a "jack of all trades" and therefore
"master of none."

------
cthalupa
For some time I thought I definitely had a shorter attention span due to the
internet - I'd be reading something, and compulsively have to go check my
email, facebook, forums I visit, hacker news, my frequented subreddits. Read a
bit more. Check everything. Repeat.

But I didn't find it all that hard to just close my laptop and put my phone
facedown more than an arm's length away. I thought it would be a titanic
struggle - but as soon as I made it slightly inconvenient to distract myself,
I found myself once again able to read through hundreds of pages of books.

It's anecdotal, of course. But for me, being able to "read" again was as
simple of giving myself the slightest barrier to getting distracted.

------
deadfece
In many instructional and self-help books, I find that the author's attempt to
hit appropriate word-count for the book format bores me to no end. Even worse,
it wastes my time. I bought your book, please don't waste 10% of your page
count in selling me the book.

I think notable exceptions to this are found in 'The Practice of System and
Network Administration' and 'Time Management for System Administrators.'

Fiction, I can read at times. For the last book I read, 'The Mote in God's
Eye', I read the first four chapters or so, then put it off for 5 months, and
then finished it in a week. That one does start off pretty slowly.

------
ChuckMcM
Fundamentally there is a sense of not wanting to 'miss' anything, I believe
that was the original force behind 24hr news channels, you watched because if
you didn't then something could have happened HOURS ago and you wouldn't even
know it yet.

I have a slightly different problem which is reading too much. It is
embarassing when you miss your stop on the train because the article you are
reading has distracted you. I also am something of a completionist when it
comes to books, so I find even when I don't "like" the book I'm compelled to
finish it.

~~~
zaphar
I'm the same way. It's bad enough that I can't read on the train because It's
guaranteed I'll miss my stop. I can't read in the evening or I'll be up till
4am finishing the book. I limit my reading to times when I have an open
stretch of several hours to avoid it colliding with some other appointment or
something.

------
Apocryphon
I was reading this article when the urge to check HN's comments to this
article struck me. Then I decided to write this comment about it in the
browser, to paste when I would be done reading.

------
sametmax
We do read. We just read in other formats. I never read has much as now,
because when you browse the internet, you essentially read.

You are just becomming picky about the format, because when there is a lot of
quantity, your brain decides what quality it wants to prioritize.

If something is long, complicated and unpleasant to read, it often can be
reformated so it's not. All text are not essais. And you don't need to read or
write an essay everyday.

So it makes sense to me. Readers to the contexte, we optimize, and writters
should too.

------
mirimir
I didn't find the article very insightful, because it lumps all "books"
together. I haven't read a technical book in several years, because it's so
much easier to find what I want online. But I read nonfiction whenever I have
the time, or want to decompress. I have no problem switching between hyper-
multitasking and deep focus.

Perhaps the author never fully learned that. I wonder if it's age-related. Or
maybe I'm the odd one: ADHD/bipolar with hard-won focusing skills ;)

------
Quanticles
Online articles are like junk food - it's more appealing but has little
substance. If you can get used to reading real books again then the online
stuff is a lot less appealing.

~~~
mhurron
Does that include this article that said something very similar?

------
tomjen3
We can. I set a simple goal of reading 100 pages a week and was stuggling with
reaching that number for quite some time. Then I started to read books that
were better written and the pages started to fly by (and it is not exactly
that the books were easier - The Strategy of Conflict is an academic book
written by an academic but it is still well written).

My guess is that the same is the case for others, which makes for a simple
solution: don't read badly written books.

------
mjrbrennan
I don't get this either, I think if you're finding it really difficult to read
a book then maybe you're not reading the right book. A book should suck you in
and not let go until you are finished. I love reading, and I just finished The
Stand which was a long book at ~1300 pages but I just could barely put it down
over the week or so that I was reading it, even with full time programming
work, commutes, and caring for a child with my partner.

------
jayvanguard
They said the same thing about television 50+ years ago. And then video games
and MTV 30 years ago. As far as I can tell people are doing just fine and
books and reading continue along uninterrupted. People are as intelligent as
they were a generation or two ago and are able to concentrate and solve
problems just fine.

The "research" on how our brains are affected by media has historically been
incredibly speculative and shoddy. Is it any different this time?

------
mjklin
My life was changed when I found out I could use smartphone apps to read texts
to me, and tell me exactly how long till I finish. I used to be too annoyed to
start a book because it seemed to drag on forever. (That plus I could never
find the right chair, lighting, etc).

Now, in contrast to other comments on here, I find the best time to listen is
just before bed on my evening walk. If I really want to get through quickly, I
listen on my commute also.

------
ojbyrne
I have found that since reading Aaron Schwartz's "I Hate the News"[1] I can
read more. I consciously try to avoid the morning news routine, replacing it
with a chapter of whatever book I'm reading.

[1]
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews)

------
Messiah_
I agree with this articles and I struggle with this.

I'm asking for help, I identified this issue: all this
browsing/facebook/YC/reddit is making my attention span and ability to focus
weaker.

How to get it back? I want to have a killer attention span and ability to
focus on one task. I started meditation in order to do this, any other
recommendation?

------
gdubs
My experience has been the opposite this year. There's a great library near by
and we had our first child. A desire to minimize electronics around the little
one, to wind down in the evenings, and to balance my digital life with
something more physical has resulted in me reading way more books in the past
year than many before it.

------
chjohasbrouck
I think reading books is a waste of time, and I'm a little tired of people
telling me I should read them.

Books are archaic, and the idea that you aren't intelligent or informed or
cultured unless you read them is just pure dogma at this point.

We have internet-connected devices now. Content can be published, peer-
reviewed, and disseminated to an international audience in under an hour. I
can have a dialogue with the person who wrote it, ask questions and submit
corrections that can be published 10 minutes later.

To me that is such a __massive __improvement over the old model that I no
longer have any time for the old model. I don 't have to wait for content from
a small handful of people at a publisher in New York, and I'm extremely
thankful for that.

I can appreciate some books as works of art or just for entertainment, but
books are an incredibly inefficient method of pursuing knowledge and culture,
and for that purpose I wouldn't recommend them to anybody.

So to answer the question posed by the title of this article: We can, we just
shouldn't, which is convenient because we don't want to.

~~~
nextos
It depends. I think both have their place. Online content tends to be much
shallower. But it allows you to explore a much broader content quickly.

Books tend to be deep, and good ones have gone through many iterations. Do you
think you can get the ideas presented in, say, SICP or Principles of
Mathematical Analysis by going through online material?

I think it may be possible, but it's actually harder.

~~~
eellpp
> Do you think you can get the ideas presented in, say, SICP or Principles of
> Mathematical Analysis by going through online material?

The parent was making the point that it's possible to have a much better
system where the book authors communicate with the readers online which
improves both the quality and ease of understanding. As of now, it may not be
the situation but in future there surely will be better ways to do things.

Also if we go by the literal meaning, book is defined as "a written or printed
work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in
covers". The part which requires "approval and published by a publisher" is a
model of a book making and there may be better models out there.

------
holri
The problem is not only with reading, but uninterrupted concentrating on a
single cognitive task.

Children do have the same behavior, before they learn to sit down and
concentrate.

We are becoming children again. Everything should be super easy. This is what
sells. A tablet for example has the haptics of a babies device.

~~~
benrhughes
IME, children (I have 4 of them) have extremely high concentration levels, if
they choose the thing they're concentrating on. My 8yo will read for hours,
uninterrupted. My 6yo reads for 30min+. Even my 3yo will happily look through
picture books for 15-30min.

~~~
holri
Well, if you happen to be a music teacher for kids you see the very poor
concentration levels of the average kid. You also see the progress of it over
time and age. And that nearly every parent is overestimating the skills of
their own kids.

------
digi_owl
I don't have a problem reading when it is properly paginated like a book or
ebook. But when i read a online article it becomes something else because it
is just a very long scroll of text. Perhaps the one thing the web really need
is a pagination API...

~~~
woah
I prefer a long scroll of text. Less distraction. Books are paginated
arbitrarily, and it's quite a large aspect of the experience to be left up to
random chance.

~~~
_asummers
I agree. Having a scrollbar as a percentage completion indicator is a very
nice thing. I can also highlight the text on the page where I was at in the
likely event I get distracted and have to move on to something else. At this
point, I do this out of habit on any article longer than a few paragraphs.

Side note, if your site pops up a stupid SHARE THIS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER
when someone highlights text, I most likely won't read your articles. I didn't
read this one because Medium does this; SBNation articles do this, too and my
browser now loads custom Javascript on their pages to remove it. It's
distracting and serves no real purpose, except to take me out of my flow of
reading.

~~~
digi_owl
After posting the initial comment i found a most interesting Firefox
extension.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/column-
reader...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/column-reader/)

It allows me to single out the main text of a site, and break it into screen
height sized columns. These can then be paged through much like a book.

Seems to make it much easier for me at least to get through a long article
without jumping between paragraphs.

------
transpy
The author makes no considerations about writing for the web. He would hate to
hear that, of course, but there's no way I am going to read that. Well, maybe
if I feed it into a summarization app, maybe. ;)

------
tby
Since I've started to meditate a few months ago, I really read a lot _more_
than before.. It seems to lessen my need to procrastinate and feelings of
"fear of missing out".

------
cafard
We? I'm pretty sure I've finished four books since February.

------
classicsnoot
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9443897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9443897)

------
debacle
What if we're reading less and less today for the same reason we no longer
have town criers or pictograms?

------
rahilsondhi
I wanted to read this post, but it was too long and I moved on to something
else.

------
snickerdoodles
I read about 2 books per week on the Kindle, more if I have to wait on Trend
Micro (thanks Security!!).

------
lrvick
Can someone TLDR this for me?

~~~
wtf_is_up
I would, if I could still read.

------
amit_m
tl;dr

~~~
srjk
why is this grey? Don't people have a sense of humour anymore?

~~~
Silhouette
HN is not Reddit. Plenty of people make humorous or entertaining comments, but
distracting joke threads full of obvious one-liners and no real content aren't
generally welcome.

~~~
visakanv
There's actually a really interesting discussion on Quora, I think, about why
they had something along the lines of a no-humor policy.

The problem isn't that people are humorless– it's that when you reward people
for humor (often resulting in puns and pithy one liners), after a while,
people start competing to be as funny as possible– and that's all that ever
rises to the top. It crowds out more deliberate, thoughtful discussion.

I love humor and comedy myself, but it makes sense to me why a discussion
forum might deliberately choose to discourage it.

