Nonfiction books should be at the end of the funnel
Books take a long time to read. Maybe 10-20 hours. I think that there are two things that you should almost always do first.
Read a summary. This usually gives you the 80⁄20 and only takes 5-10 minutes. You can usually find a summary by googling around. Derek Sivers and James Clear come to mind as particularly good resources.
Listen to a podcast or talk. Nowadays, from what I could tell, authors typically go on a sort of podcast tour before releasing a book in order to promote it. I find that this typically serves as a good ~hour long overview of the important parts of the book. For more prominent authors, sometimes they’ll also give a talk—eg. Talks at Google—after releasing.
I think it really depends on your reading speed. If you can read at 500 wpm, then it’s probably faster for you to just read the book than search around for a podcast and then listen to said podcast. I do agree, though, that reading a summary or a blog about the topic is often a good replacement for reading an entire book.
then it’s probably faster for you to just read the book than search around for a podcast and then listen to said podcast
I’m having trouble seeing how that’d ever be the case. In my experience searching for a podcast rarely takes more than a few minutes, so let’s ignore that part of the equation.
If a book normally takes 10 hours to read, let’s say you’re a particularly fast reader and can read 5x as fast as the typical person (which I’m skeptical of). That’d mean it still takes 2 hours to read the book. Podcast episodes are usually about an hour. But if you’re able to read 5x faster that probably implies that you’re able to listen to the podcast at at least 2x speed if not 3x, in which case the podcast would only take 0.5 hours to go through, which is 4x faster than it’d take to read the book.
Nonfiction books should be at the end of the funnel
Books take a long time to read. Maybe 10-20 hours. I think that there are two things that you should almost always do first.
Read a summary. This usually gives you the 80⁄20 and only takes 5-10 minutes. You can usually find a summary by googling around. Derek Sivers and James Clear come to mind as particularly good resources.
Listen to a podcast or talk. Nowadays, from what I could tell, authors typically go on a sort of podcast tour before releasing a book in order to promote it. I find that this typically serves as a good ~hour long overview of the important parts of the book. For more prominent authors, sometimes they’ll also give a talk—eg. Talks at Google—after releasing.
I think it really depends on your reading speed. If you can read at 500 wpm, then it’s probably faster for you to just read the book than search around for a podcast and then listen to said podcast. I do agree, though, that reading a summary or a blog about the topic is often a good replacement for reading an entire book.
I’m having trouble seeing how that’d ever be the case. In my experience searching for a podcast rarely takes more than a few minutes, so let’s ignore that part of the equation.
If a book normally takes 10 hours to read, let’s say you’re a particularly fast reader and can read 5x as fast as the typical person (which I’m skeptical of). That’d mean it still takes 2 hours to read the book. Podcast episodes are usually about an hour. But if you’re able to read 5x faster that probably implies that you’re able to listen to the podcast at at least 2x speed if not 3x, in which case the podcast would only take 0.5 hours to go through, which is 4x faster than it’d take to read the book.