The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.
There's an ocean of garbage books basically mass produced by ghost writers, solely targeted at milking a socially hot topic or grifting.
There's an obesity epidemic ? Let's make 3000 new books repackaging classic diets under new catchy titles and see which sticks. AI is coming ? Let's throw money at anyone with a vaguely related blog and expand their 3 hot takes into 300 pages with a nice title and cover.
At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.
> The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.
If all you're looking for is any book, then sure. But if you have specific interests in mind, or you actually take the time to get beyond an HBR listicle of the "5 best books for [x] topic", you can find so many good books. Too many too read in a lifetime. It's just insane how many great books there are given how many books there are already and are published every year. Even just subscribing to a pub like the NYRB or LRB and reading the reviews/essays has made my TBR list explode with interesting books. Then you have the smaller academic or niche presses that are publishing some great, serious, academic or weirdo fiction stuff, stuff that has no marketing whatsoever.
> At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.
Those books are very easy to spot. You can safely ignore 99% of Business, Productivity, Nutrition (add fitness), and pop-science, books, as you already noted. A lot of pre-internet books on those topics are fascinating, though, because they're usually written nothing at all like a blog post, and as examples that there has been very little world-changing written in those topics in the last 30-40 years.
You're right. And then the same thing applies to any generic medium: looking beyond the bulk of it and focusing on the good parts will yield life changing discoveries.
I think the main points are whether there's an incentive for communicate, and whether filtering mechanisms can surface the interesting parts. For a long time, book deals and publications were basically the only venue to monetize ideas at scale.
Nowadays monetization can happen differently and more diverse media. Also a well trained algorithm will often be better than having only human curation, all biases included.
All in all, I've learned more and read more research papers starting from online videos and discussions in the last decade than from any of the books I read in my entire life. That's where I see obsessions on a single medium (books) to miss the mark.
The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.
There's an ocean of garbage books basically mass produced by ghost writers, solely targeted at milking a socially hot topic or grifting.
There's an obesity epidemic ? Let's make 3000 new books repackaging classic diets under new catchy titles and see which sticks. AI is coming ? Let's throw money at anyone with a vaguely related blog and expand their 3 hot takes into 300 pages with a nice title and cover.
At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.