thousands? if your average book has 300 pages, and you read 30 pages per hour, you would need to read for 10000 hours, doing it for 8 hours a day you need 1250 days. that's without repeating anything of course.
am i wrong? in what timespan did you read those thousands of books?
I'm not the original poster, but I've found that most 300 page business books contain 10-20 pages of useful info and 280-290 pages of fluff and filler. I generally skim through the average business book in an hour or 2, including the time to make notes of all the potentially useful advice I find. It's rare to find a business book worth carefully reading cover to cover.
That's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high.
It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, and easily read 200-400 books a year.
Wow, and you actually find these books valuable? Any book I read that I truly learn something from usually takes weeks or months to get through. Call me slow but it just takes time for real information to sink in for me. Sure I understand the words, but to fully absorb the knowledge takes time. Reading 200-400 books a year - how do you ever get the chance to absorb any of that information? If you can really learn valuable information from a book in 10-20 minutes than I am jealous.
Maybe business books are just different than technical/science oriented ones.
Business texts and technical books are very different. I read math/science/programming books as well - I'm currently working through Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes. There's no way I could grok that book in 20 minutes.
10-20 minutes won't cut it for deep technical material, particularly if the book is designed to teach via working through examples. If you're reading a workbook, then take the time to work through the examples. Choose your workbooks carefully, since they require a more significant time investment.
Most non-fiction books, however, are written around a few simple, straightforward concepts - you can identify them in a few minutes. A few more minutes identifying examples, relationships to other concepts, and counter-examples / edge cases, and you've extracted 90% of the value of the text.
Almost every non-fiction book fits this model. It pays to tailor your reading approach to what you're reading.
As to value - in general, most business books are marginally valuable in isolation. Once you read many of them, however, very useful patterns begin to emerge. Recognizing and using those patterns provides the value.
The short answer: Syntax Error.
--
I spend a lot of time working with different languages and frameworks. Though my day job is PHP, I've got an itch to make a mobile game.
Since they're not actually written in PHP, I've got to switch to a new language. ObjectiveC for iPhone, Android-Java, or any number of cross platform languages to pick up a third party framework.
On top of that - there's the issues of structure and stuff.
For learning a new language, there's no way to skim.
HOWEVER for something like an A* pathfinding algorythm (an artificial intelligence method of finding the most efficient path from A to Anywhere) - you can get the "Gist" by skimming a paper. I understand what A* is and how it does it ... but if I want to replicate it I still have to go over it line-by-line if I want to get it right though.
So, I think the short answer is "NO" coders can't skim stuff and get the job done right.
Wow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading?
-- 10-20 minutes per book?
-- 20 to 30 books in a few hours.
I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins.
I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.
It only works on books that are two pages of content padded out with three hundred pages of sales.
Fortunately, this is what nearly all "business" books are. They repeat that two pages of content over and over. If you spend 20 minutes skimming, chances are you will hit the actual content at least once.
Another interesting point is that most business books, if they cite references, usually only cite a few. Often times one can look up the paper(s) it references and get the actual content in a much more, ah, compact form, without most of the sales.
Of course, /actually reading/ business books rather than skimming them, I think, is a reasonable way to figure out how to talk to and even to sell to business people. I mean, that's what the book is doing, right? even if the actual "content" of the book is complete BS, if the book is a popular one, it's obviously good at selling to business people, and you can learn by example.
Just this morning I had the idea that since so many books are appearing in electronic format it won't be long before lots of the text has been tagged. I'm reading an enjoyable book about sleep right now. In many places the author goes into personal stories that led to a particular discovery. I thought 'wouldn't it be nice to be able to have those parts filtered for me by my Kindle software?'.
I could see things getting to the point to where you could have the option to generate an executive summary from any popular book that tries to hit the main points. Then you drill down as you want more information. Books could function almost like mini-wikis at that point but with a narrative or order that you use to drive through it.
Serendipity! I was thinking the same thing -- though I was thinking more along the lines of Quora posts.
This is a feature I have posted about and asked for on Reddit actually; the ability to tag information to topic and quality etc.
This would really apply to quora best though, as the information is already sorted in one dimenstion: quora topics.
I'd like to be able to assemble and curate information from sources like quora and get them into a more of a how-to; infact I posted a question along these lines on quora, with little response.
However - I predict that this will be a golden goose of social search. A question is asked within a particular topic, experts respond - then the best answers to the most popular questions within a topic, and tagged by the audience, are assembled into cliff-notes of information on that topic.
Quite the opposite, actually - I tried to write a fluff-free business book. I think that's why readers are finding it useful. If you can read it in 20 minutes, I'll be impressed. :-)
That's a great point and unfortunately it does not work that way with math books.
Well, fortunately in that the signal-to-noise ratio is high. Unfortunately in that one must be very selective about what one chooses to invest time into reading.
