by bumbledraven on 2/11/25, 7:50 PM with 36 comments
by beezlebroxxxxxx on 2/11/25, 8:51 PM
There's a whole higher echelon of non-fiction books that are more like academic books targeting a learned mass culture. These are often academic books with all or most of the footnotes and citations shaved off. Or they're just incredibly well written non-fiction storytelling, like the books of David McCullough, to give one example. Another: the essays by Mark Grief (even his one academic monograph is a stellar read by the standards of academic writing).
> Because we have too many books already, and publishing as a status play pollutes the information environment.
Tbh, this writer seems to not realize how much garbage was published in the past. Self-help "slop" has been a perennial catalogue filler for decades, if not centuries. The "too many books" argument runs into, I believe, an unspoken desire by the writer. Eventually you begin to notice what's worth reading and what isn't. You begin to trust certain publishers and writers over others. You begin to cultivate your own tastes and filter. Sometimes, you also just want a syllabus that lays out the "major works" in a field for you. Sometimes you want to find that out for yourself. Which is all to say, this writer seems to be asking for only something like Wikipedia or fiction, with non-fiction books dissolved and absorbed into the former. But one of the best parts of non-fiction writing is the author's point of view, their personality, their voice.
by thundergolfer on 2/11/25, 8:40 PM
Higher levels of media literacy involve understanding exactly these dynamics described by the author and avoiding this bad kind of non-fiction, mass market non-fiction.
Another interesting dynamic in fiction writing is that fiction book prices do not scale linearly with page count, but costs kinda do, so authors are discouraged from writing 800 pages tomes like Middlemarch and War & Peace.
by phoe-krk on 2/11/25, 8:37 PM
Anecdata: as glad as I am for Apress for working with me and releasing my own book about a part of Common Lisp (which is, technically, non-fiction!), I still cannot fathom their re-release of "Interpreting LISP" [1] - a book that I hated to give a zero-star rating on Reddit [2] but that I can only warn people about, if I am to be acting in good faith.
[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-2707-7
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/6qc61v/second_edition...
by Insanity on 2/11/25, 8:21 PM
- bad blood (about theranos)
- SPQR
- King Leopold’s Ghost
- Lost in Math
- masters of doom
by Ekaros on 2/11/25, 9:51 PM
by kenjackson on 2/11/25, 9:03 PM
That said, I feel like I know most things in most books of this form. My trouble is actually doing what they say. And before you suggest something like Atomic Habits -- I also read the 2-page summary of that book.
by bog_hag on 2/11/25, 9:28 PM
by olelele on 2/12/25, 10:03 AM
As far as I understood things a few years ago the company was surviving bc one of the giants bought their service for its employees.
by mindwok on 2/11/25, 9:54 PM
by samspot on 2/11/25, 8:55 PM
by jhsvsmyself on 2/11/25, 8:37 PM
by jjice on 2/11/25, 8:39 PM
> If you read a few of these books, you inevitably notice the patterns: every chapter begins with an anecdote...
It really feels like padding sometimes. I've read some books where the anecdote does provide some value as a lead in to a topic, like in Extreme Ownership. Most of the time though, it really feels like a way to hit a publisher minimum page count.
I personally see a shorter book as a potentially good thing, not a lack of value. Not that page count is a great measure of the value a book can provide, but I definitely don't see it as a negative.