Read Best-Selling Books in Minutes With This Micro Book Library

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/30/read-best-selling-books-in-min.html

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So it goes.

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Each micro book […] includes all the key ideas from the full-length book.

No, it obviously doesn’t, since otherwise the full-length book would only need to be that long.
It would be like suggesting that one could read a newspaper by just reading the headlines. You’d get a general idea of what is going on in the world, sure, but no more than that.

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These posts make me so embarrassed for BoingBoing. I know you need to pay the bills but they feel like Cory showing up in Ginsu Knife commercial.

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I was just thinking that. I’ve been around since the 90s, and the slide into advertisement has been slow and steady. Anymore, I find the things they post a day or two earlier on other news aggregation sites. Coupled with the heavy video advertising that takes up so much CPU I can rarely have more than a few of their tabs open… it’s been sad to watch unfold. I fear they may be approaching (or have passed) the saturation point, after which the signal to noise ratio is just too low to support the traffic needed for a viable website.

But, that’s me, and I respect I don’t have insights into the decision making process. I’m sure there’s many constraints that I’m unaware of that require these decisions. I do wish the best of luck for the crew, and a return to the futuristic and fantastic.

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Abridging books is not new. It’s still like only watching the episode summaries of a TV series, or only the trailers of movies.

“Are those madeleines? Yum!” - Abridged Proust.

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Or reading the Reader’s Digest version of bestsellers:

Having had to work on some nonfiction books over the years, sometimes they are just expanded versions of a brief synopsis plus a few key passages to attain something like a book length (at times with help from larger margins and a larger type size than most nonfiction titles). These books can mostly be boiled down to reading the A-headings in the table of contents and skimming for italic terms and boldface passages, and reading the last chapter.

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