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Comment by mafribe | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion all that hand-wringing about people no longer reading long text misses a crucial point: long writing was necessary only where quick contextualisation was impossible, i.e. before the invention of the web, search engines etc. Books had to be long to give the reader the context so the key idea of the text can easily be communicated. Hence long text is a consequence of technological flaws of the previously dominant platform for text distribution, printing.

The availability of the net, linking, search technology from google to grep has changed all that. Not surprisingly, digital natives move away from long text.

We should be happy that information transmission has become a tiny bit less painful. That's not to say that there isn't a place for long, continuous text, but it should be more an exception than the norm.

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There are some subjects where quick context is adequate or even optimal - coding and cooking have a lot of uses for quick snippets of knowledge - but there are many, many subjects where deep context is necessary if you want to achieve anything beyond cursory knowledge of the basic facts, let alone expertise. I dare say that someone that's read a book about, say, any given historical era or person, has a better understanding of it than anybody that's done all of their reading on wikipedia.

>> I dare say that someone that's read a book about, say, any given historical era or person, h

Usually history books are on the one hand, so full of details that you'll probably never remember, and on the other hand, rarely condense the context and present patterns and abstractions of the issue .

And unlike technical books , they are pretty awful at just-in-time learning(like just answering a specific question about history), which is an important mode of learning/knowing.

So if you count in long-term understanding and general usefulness, most historical books aren't that great.

So are you saying the Wikipedia reader might have a stronger grasp of historical subjects?

I chose history because it's dense on details, so a decent measure of a medium's ability to impart deep knowledge of a domain - a strongly written narrative is thus a powerful tool for bringing together a deluge of facts and figures in a comprehensible and memorable way.

And whether or not "most" history books are unreadable is irrelevant to the savvy reader, because the internet has also made it exceedingly easy to find the best books on any subject written by people highly skilled at putting together the most memorable and insightful narrative with the most relevant, up-to-date facts.

If we're talking about mediums for history,not sure about wikipedia, but i think an high-quality, high volume forum witha good search , like reddit.com/r/askhistorians [1] is a great one , better than books in many cases.

And yes, maybe some books solve this, but it's very rare as far as i've noticed. There's something about books, also evident in non-fiction that makes people write too much unneeded stuff.

[1]It's far better to search this forum using google, using site:reddit.com/r/askhistorians

Thanks for the recommendation but haven't you just pointed me to a forum of heavy book readers? Every top answer I've read cites a book or a long form journal article as its source. If you wanted to know one specific thing, I'm sure this is a great resource (sincerely: thanks!), but I doubt the posters themselves would recommend their own posts over the authoritative books they cite if you wanted to develop anything like deep knowledge on a given topic.

This might be a great place to start, but if you actually wanted to make your own deep connections about history or substantial ideas or wanted to understand the economic/cultural/political/technical origins of well anything, I'm astounded that people think they can cobble that from websites, let alone ones that are decidedly not long form.

I agree with your point but I also understand why people who spent their whole life crafting long texts are confused by the new situation. If I would have spent 30 years in the newspaper industry I wouldn't want to switch to confer information with slides/html5/photoshop/programs/videos. It's just so far off from what makes a good writer.

"...long writing was necessary only where quick contextualisation was impossible"

Adler and Doren's "How to Read a Book" covers quick contextualization; there were techniques and ideas about this starting in the early 70s, most of which is still very relevant and I've found very useful in my own reading life.

That book is anything but quick.

Here's a summary of the book I found more useful than the book itself: http://www.oxfordtutorials.com/How%20to%20Read%20a%20Book%20...

I agree with all of the above. However, strange as it is, I have started appreciating really good long-form writing lately. I really enjoy nautil.us, the site that is always posting their long-form articles on here, to the point that I got a subscription. I also enjoy long form essays on Medium and Quanta magazine seems to have some good stuff as well. That's just been my personal evolving experience with reading in the last 2-3 years.

Hmmm. I wonder if quick one search stops allow us to cherry pick articles which we presuppose our world views.

I know I've done it.

Perhaps lengthy reading isn't necessary but the ability to focus sure is and I personally am of the opinion that they probably correlate (although I have no evidence).

Reading a 15 page New Yorker article exposes me to perspectives I'd never have seen. Do quick google searches do that?

That's a very good point. Thanks.

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