Have you ever wanted to skim a book — but not actually to read it? image

You know the kind I mean. Books which are topical, controversial or informational but not actually that important in the grand scheme of things (when compared to Rabelais, Goethe, Lady Murasaki, etc). Current publishing is in love with these books. Well-researched and edited, mildly academic (but heavens, not too many footnotes!). Celebrity life stories, CEOs relating the secrets to success, software gurus imparting their secret methodology to guarantee that your software will be awesome,  touchy-feely books about God, marriage, success, moving the cheese, etc.  People enjoy reading these things (and publishers love publishing them).

A year or two ago I went to the bookstore and read Freakonomics in 30 minutes on one of the store’s comfy chairs. Really good book actually. Lots of footnotes too.

But what happens if the practical wisdom which makes these books  so readable and popular also make them easy to summarize? I’m not talking plagiarism but  book outline wikis? Here are some recent outlines:

Other book summaries can be found on wikisummaries:

(Also, I’m sure most of these books have their own wikipedia pages. Which reminds me: who are setting up these wikipedia pages–the publishers themselves?)

I probably would never read these books (even from the library), but reading a single page synopsis is painless and fun. For many of these kinds of books, the core message can be related fairly quickly; these books aim don’t aspire to describe complex ideas but to describe one or two core ideas succinctly.

If these books can be summarized so easily, why bother reading (or buying) them?  To succeed as a book (in every sense of the word), you have to provide a book experience which defy easy summaries. You read for style, narrative, anecdotes, verbal wit, suspense and specificity of detail.  Even a book about management (say Peter Drucker’s management books, for example) have witticisms and peculiar details. According to Peter Drucker, Franz Kafka popularized the use of the hard hat in industrial settings.  From his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker wrote about new bookstore chains, “any salesperson who wants to read anything besides the price tag is hopelessly overqualified.”

Question: In an age where wiki sites can “pilfer” the informational message of a book, will these outline sites hurt a book’s lifespan or help it?

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3 COMMENTS

  2. My experience with self-help and how-to books over the years brought me to the conclusion that 99% of them are actually 50-page tracts which have to be filled out to at least 250 pages in order to justify a $20 ($25, $30…) cover price.

    So there is a lot of personal history, case history, and cheerleading wrapped around the basic information the book wishes to convey. Sometimes this ancillary matter helps, sometimes it’s just dead weight.

    There must be something of a cottage industry in this regard, I remember something called Executive Summary or Executive Briefing, a newsletter affair that summarized all the business books for time-harried executives.

    As they say, ‘you can’t copyright an idea.’

    The move to ebooks ought to free publishers and writers from the whole paradigm that a ‘book’ must be a certain length to justify its price, the price being mandatory to cover fixed costs of transportation etc., as well as a marketing notion that a bigger books offers ‘more value for your dollar.’

    After all, isn’t our time worth something, too?

    The big exception in nonfiction to this trend is in history and politics (well, sometimes political books are contained in the few words of their titles!). A book about the events and decisions that led to the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, for example, or one about the roots of WW2, or FDR’s first days in office.

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