Books and Blogs

Rant follows.

Reading is taking up much of my free time these days. Of course I am not talking about the reading online. Spending time online has been a huge time sink for me (and as I can imagine, for millions of other people like me) over the years. I have turned to reading books with more enthusiasm ever since I realized that the stuff that I read online does not stay with me for a long while, while the books I read have a profound way of changing the way I think.

Now don’t get me wrong; I am not blindly implying that all the information out there in the web is a waste of time. I am just saying that for me personally, books give more satisfaction when I finish one compared to hundreds of blog entries I used to devour on a constant basis. Even though I have cut short on the number of blogs I visit and the number of articles I actually read, there are communities like Hacker News where I tend to hang out. Hacker News is a great source of news, information and inspiration for the curious type, but it may also have the effect of wasting a whole lot of your time if you start believing that all of the time you spend on Hacker News is productive.

Reading itself is not a productive activity in the absolute sense of the word (or in any other sense of the word I can imagine), but it is a really fulfilling and satisfying experience (not to mention that it strokes your ego when the height of the books you stacked up in your cupboard grows more than that in your close friends’ room). Even though reading books involves seemingly similar activities as to reading a blog, there are some real differences that make them worlds apart in actual utility.

The first is that your mouse is a constant stream of distraction at your fingertips. Every time I read an article, I try (in vain) not to click on the other tabs to check my email or the traffic stats of my blog; not to mention the advertisements and other outbounds links in the same page itself. Even the hyper-links in the article you read are very distracting, according to some [1]. Now that you have noticed it, that is the reason I am not using any hyper-links in the middle of this article. Many of the links in a typical blog post point to the definition of terms in the Wikipedia anyway, and they are not very useful; but I digress.

The point is that just the act of sitting in front of the computer with the goal of consuming the internet translates into thousands of interesting (or irrelevant) articles, news, stories, pictures and videos fighting for your attention. The problem is that you have only a finite amount of attention. You have only a finite amount of stuff you can process per day.Yes, there is a limit to your cognitive ability. This means that there is a limit to what you can read and assimilate in a given time. And this in turn means that all those distractions are getting the way of you learning something useful. Now I am not advocating that you abandon your fair share of lolcats, but rather wondering whether you are spending a lot more time on them than what can be deemed excusable.

The second difference between books and blogs is that a book is a lot more harder to write than a blog post. You can be sloppy while writing a blog post, knowing that you can later change your words as necessary. Books are very difficult to get published compared to blog posts. Getting a decent publisher to publish your book is not going to be easy for you.  This means that only very few books which are written are actually published and whatever is published goes through a good deal of scrutiny and editing which enhances the quality of the material you get to consume. This does not mean that there are no well-written and well-edited articles out there in the web. I am talking about the typical blog post (By the way, referring to the typical stuff is a great way to say anything you want in an argument). Even given these facts, you can find great articles worth reading in the web by following news aggregators like Reddit or Hacker News, but then again there comes the problem of loads of wasted time with these websites. Even though news aggregators are good at finding the best articles in the web, there is one other fundamental difference between books and essays that makes me go back to good books.

The third difference between a book and essays is that a book has got all the time in the world to convince you of the idea that it is trying to sell. Books are usually hundreds of times longer than your typical blog post and this means that a book author can take his time to establish the basics and build on them and the take the reader through the innards of the subject he wants to write about. The fact that a book takes hundreds of pages to present its plot means that the idea the book tries to sell will stay in the back of my mind for many years, compared to an essay whose central thesis will be forgotten in a matter of minutes when other distractions occupy my brain.

So my request to the dear reader will be to complement what you read in the web with some very good offline reading. Good books can change you life, while blog posts usually are not that powerful. And while we are at it, just keep in mind that producing something useful and making something people want^TM is way more better than reading books 24 hours a day.

That’s it. We are done here. Go away.

[1] Experiments in delinkification

[2] Photo credit: somegeekintn