I'm a big fan of the adage to not read anything younger than 10/20/30 years old. by definition most books are mediocre, especially new ones, and only reading stuff older than a certain age helps filter out the crap.

same goes with blog posts to a certain extent - there are a number of shorter works that are constantly posted on HN (http://jsomers.net/hn/) and many of them are worth reading. though tbh I read a lot of articles all over the internet from any time. blame it on lack of discipline

Hah, this is exploiting the old, 'back in my day music was good, unlike whatever you are listening to now'.

In other words, you let everyone else filter for you.

Or: Lindy Effect, survivorship bias, some kind of incentive that selects for quality over time, etc.

Music is almost purely for entertainment and not for information so tastes can afford to be variable. And books are published on all sorts of topics so even despite this, among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.

> And books are published on all sorts of topics so even despite this, among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.

This is recursive and implies a decrease in diversity over time, starting from enormously high and reaching abysmally small. But I am fairly certain that it doesn't hold.

> among old books you can find weird things that disagree with each other.

I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?

I fail to see the difference between music and books tbh. Whatever remains popular has, as you said, some property or quality that helps preserve it in memory.

> This is recursive and implies a decrease in diversity over time, starting from enormously high and reaching abysmally small. But I am fairly certain that it doesn't hold.

What books are considered part of a canon will always trail behind the total number of books being published, so the total set will either remain stable or increase in size.

However, I think your assumption that it will somehow converge only holds if the criterion of quality are both universal and consistent. Neither has to be true – different cultures have different measures and weights for quality, and within cultures there are disagreement as to what quality is (even in a contemporary setting). Hence my next claim.

> I fail to see what makes old books capable of disagreeing with each other and recent releases incapable. At some point new releases become old and therefore they suddenly attain the ability to disagree with each other?

That's the point – it equivocates the two which allows you to be indifferent between them upto other factors, since you should expect both new and old books to be diverse, rather than the monoculture of thought you are attempting to resist by going completely your own way. Those other factors can include possible selection effects like I have claimed above which act as signals for a book's quality.

I guess the only thing left to add is that you can't read everything, but there's a lot you could read. Given this problem, does one be an early adopter for a book or not?

Thank you for explaining your POV. In retrospect, my first comment insinuates a lazy approach to filtering. However, I didn't intend so, and it caused a misunderstanding, because we are in agreement. I did not intend to suggest that 'allowing other people to select for you' creates a monoculture, though the lack of information in the sentence and my subsequent replies points to that.

> I guess the only thing left to add is that you can't read everything, but there's a lot you could read. Given this problem, does one be an early adopter for a book or not?

The answer to the explore-exploit dilemma is dependent on the remaining time and your reward function, i.e. goals. I am still in my infancy as an avid reader, therefore I can not give a good enough comment.

Riffing off of this:

A better heuristic that can accommodate both the observation and necessity of change in how books are appraised could be: "What is the oldest possible correct book for the given topic, that continues to be read today?" If new books come for new topics that's fine, read them if the topic matters. Else older books might be better to use given the previous argument.

> I'm a big fan of the adage to not read anything younger than 10/20/30 years old

The only issue I really have with this is textbooks. Especially true for humanities/history where some new things have come to light or new theories/fields have developed.

> by definition most books are mediocre

What? Oh, well, in that regard most elements in any category is mediocre. Doesn’t really mean much...

Sturgeon's law: "ninety percent of everything is crap." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

It's not uncommon for those types of books (as you mentioned, for example, Malcolm Gladwell) to come into being as a result of a series of blog posts.

A couple examples are Cal Newport and Mark Manson. Their books aren't bad, but they could be reduced to probably 1/3 of their actual length without much loss of insight.

Blinkist and similar tools are a good enough solution for this. But those are locked up behind a paywall. I've been importing links to book summaries (along with authors' TED talks, podcasts etc) in LearnAwesome.org (my open-source project) so that when looking up a book, user can easily discover summaries,interviews,talks covering the same ideas in a more preferable format.

I listen to audiobooks, it helps to filter boring books. And after listening to the audiobook If I feel that I missed a lot I can read a regular book.

There is a great book "how to read a book" by Mortimer J. Adler. It teaches to filter books and understand if it worth reading

Hehe I read that and once I got the gist from the first two chapters, I filtered it and stopped reading it.

I've read too many of the first that lately it has killed most of my motivation to read any non-fiction books (the last couple I started, I just never finished because essentially I got bored). I enjoy reading (and still read fiction), and I want to have that motivation, but I just can't seem to muster it. This includes books that have good reviews, because apparently a lot of people don't seem to mind. It just seems like there's a lot of people writing books because it's "the thing to do" and probably makes more money than the couple blog posts or long article that would have been a better format.

Anyone else experience this, and how did you get past it?

I experienced the same thing. Waiting for recommendations from similarly minded people helped me get past it.

I didn't read any non-fiction for a long time before I was given a book as a gift [0] that was really good. Since then, I have received a few other recommendations that I enjoyed [1-2].

[0] Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell

[1] Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

[2] The Theoretical Minimum Series by Leonard Susskind

Honestly, you've already identified the problem (reading books of the "first kind"), so you know what to do. Stop picking up books just because they're best sellers. That would be a great start.

You could take it a step further and read academic reviews, which are about the size of a book chapter but are otherwise meant to be self-contained pieces of writing on a topic.

You are overthinking this. Some people just like reading those books and you don't. It's personal preference. Just try reading new genres you haven't given a chance before and maybe you will find something interesting.

I'd like it if the trend became to write business books as a collection of essays rather than around a single topic. I'm sort of imagining Paul Graham's essays bound into a book or something similar. That way it's not unnecessarily verbose, but still long enough to warrant putting into a book.

I love essay compilations, the latest one I read was Umberto Eco's Chronicles of a Liquid Society. A compilation of his columns in l’Espresso magazine. Such a good format, doesn't waste any space in his writing whatsoever (that's Eco and the format).

I would really appreciate more of this kind, any commenters here have suggestions?

Business books — even the insightful ones — are typically only 2-3 pages long (there a few, very few, exceptions). But that can’t sell at the airport so they are padded out like washing powder.

Some of these can be worth the squeeze / time (e.g. stuff from Mark Manson imo), but the litmus test I use is whether the author trying to do any one (or more of the following):

* "inspire" me with useless stories from other people, i.e. stuff that isn't anything beyond "wow amazing feat!" with no practical utility. These are most of the trash pop-biz or pop-psych books that talk about the marshmallow experiment for the Nth time... * use their book to get speaking engagements (e.g. by checking their website) * does the book contain a goofy diagram to abstractly illustrate their point in a bass-ackwards way? (The Conjoined Triangles of Six-Sigma Success!)

In all fairness, examples and context usually would push them out past magazine length. (It's also true that, based on the complaints here about things like recipe embellishments, I'm probably more tolerant than some.)

That said, many/most are padded out. In general, you can't publish a book unless it's 250 pages or so. The economics for publishers apparently just don't work out. Fairly or not, a lot of people at least subconsciously buy by the pound. They're not going to pay $20 for a 50 page book in general.