Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/11/with-this-book-summary-app-you-can-read-an-entire-best-selling-book-in-4-minutes.html
…
The headline is misleading. You are not reading an entire book in four minutes. You are reading a summary of the book. That the headline confuses the two tells us a good deal about the endangered status of reading today.
6 Likes
That doesn’t take much more than four minutes to read in its full and unabridged form. But even four minutes is too long to waste on it. Hell, four seconds is more than enough:
Lost your job? Stop whining and find another one, loser.
Several jobs back, our CEO gave everyone in the company a copy of this dreck when we were going through some “restructuring”. There was more than a little schadenfreude some months later when were folded back into the parent corporation and he got his cheese moved.
6 Likes
Kind of a puzzling service overall. I thought maybe it was for checking out books one might want to read, but then from what I can see they provide nothing that the Amazon or Goodreads summary and reviews don’t. I get so irritated that reviewers online tend to summarize the book, sometimes chapter by chapter, in detail. It seems like what they are doing here is just that, only packaged and sold.
Maybe there is a market for people who like to read Amazon book pages and don’t realize they can do it for free? This doesn’t seem like enough to fool people into thinking you’ve read the book, so I really don’t see how it provides much else.
Interesting selection of books on their Youtube page. I wonder if it’s a hint as to their target consumers…
For $400 when not on sale, you can get information available on Wikipedia and podcasts that are probably available on literary podcasts. All for free. This service doesn’t sit well with me at all.
3 Likes
Thanks for sharing that. It’s for the self improvement people who don’t want to put work into anything. Got it.
With this book summary app, you can read an entire best-selling book in 4 minutes
NO! NO YOU FUCKING CAN’T, YOU FUCKWITS!!
If this ad were on any other media in the UK it would be banned. Advertising has to be legal, decent, honest and truthful. This fails the last two, egregiously.
Rule 1.1 of the Advertising Standards Authority states
But the StackCommerce marketing wankers are lucky they are not in the UK, seeing as rule 1.5 would find them in breach on just about every ad they ever wrote.
Is there a more disreputable advertiser than StackCommerce? I’ve yet to see one, but I’m sure there’s plenty of competition in the capitalist’s ‘land of the free’ paradise that is the unregulated USA.
(Yeah, I’m feeling a bit cranky this morning, for other reasons. This just lit my blue touch-paper. /rant)
ETA Maybe someone could get the legal eagles pursuing the case against King’s Hawaiian Rolls to get an action going re this advert? I’d love to see a post on BB mocking a story about that!
5 Likes
The Joy of Sex (in four minutes) 
3 Likes
A Brief History of Time? (The world’s most started but unfinished book.)
4 Likes
Like the old joke:
I speed-read War and Peace in four minutes. It’s about Russia.
6 Likes
It’s true this should be flagged as misleading. It’s equally as misleading as an offer to visit the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal, the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Wall of China in 4 minutes each (then providing a 4-minute written summary of what it’s like to visit each of those places). Confusing “knowing what’s in a book” with the actual experience of “reading a book” is another pretty sad indictment of many people’s relationship with reading.
2 Likes
flim-flam
codswallop
horse feathers
Wait. What do you do with the other 3 minutes?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
