I actually think books are just the right size. Otherwise, Cliff's notes and blog post summaries would have taken over the book market by now. It isn't the job of authors to succinctly summarize their own work. They are in fact the least qualified people to do so
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That assumes sufficiently worthwhile books in a perfect market. Most books are not worth the trouble to summarize and those that are mostly lack a liquid market of people with the talent to summarize them better than Cliff.
Groucho Marx effect: anyone capable of summarizing a book better is likely writing their own.
Still I suspect some summaries might get read more than originals, though I wouldn’t know how to check.
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Books are often used to raise one’s profile for speaking gigs, etc — not always chosen for reasons related to message efficiency
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But I think the low quality underground is necessary for innovation. No one has any clue how to pick winning books so we need people trying every kind of thing
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I suspect most people don't learn much from book summaries.
Some highly intellectually productive people probably do, but it's like saying you learned the math formula w/o doing the problem sets.
A good book teaches use of a concept through repeated application, examples...
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This doesn’t really happen anymore. Simultaneous release with ebooks is the norm



