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I find I don’t enjoy review-summaries unless I have a sense of why the reviewer is reading, what their own larger project is. If their larger project is just something like “read 100 books on X” I get bored. That shtick was interesting 5 years ago.
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Yeah definitely feel like an asshole posting this thread especially since I drafted off the benefits of writing about books back when there were far fewer people doing it and they had way more cachet than they do today.
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In 2009 nobody ever said of a book, “this should be a thread at best”. Even the fluffiest faddish business book was given benefit of doubt of having a decent essay’s worth of content to it. Books meant something beyond just being an intellectual calling card for “thought leaders”
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I think the book as a mainstream medium is possibly dead. Now new books are of the following types: 1. Personal brand calling card 2. Scholarly specialist things 3. B2B middleware for movies/TV, incidentally also read by nerds 4. Reactionary memberberries for waldenponders
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noob-level writing procrastination: I'll do the dishes basic-level writing procrastination: I just need to THINK about it more expert-level writing procrastination: let me explain how books are dead
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heh touche, though at least in my case, I'm not procrastinating right now. I'm writing portions in a fairly risky way that may not lend itself to being eventually cast in a book form :)
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That's genuinely exciting. It's a really limited form, which I think is very useful for taming a certain kind of creativity, and stifling for others. The format really hasn't been disrupted yet and I'm sure it will be.
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