Three Reasons Why the Idea That Most Books Should Be Blogposts is Wrong
Do you believe that most books should be blog posts? I don’t.
Twitter is full of people supporting this reductionist rhetoric. The sudden realisation of the time scarcity associated with the constant increase of information surrounding us makes it convenient to make want most information should come in smaller and more convenient “containers”.
I used to believe that most books could be synthesised into tweets and blogs, so what changed my mind?
1. We want to see the world simpler than it is
While a blog post or a tweet gives us a surface level of an idea, this might not be enough.
We often need further information to recognise the different contexts in which frameworks/tips work and the situations in which they did/did not work.
It is easier to sell an overgeneralisation than a more complex
2. There are a lot of bad books, but the good books are still there.
Perhaps some authors try to milk a single idea too much, but that’s not always the case.
It is difficult to add the extra information the reader should know about a topic to understand the whole picture. A great book might be able to do so briefly or keep you entertained while it takes you through more extended reasoning or added information.
Ultimately, the book will still be different from the original blog post, yet the blog post might be a good place to start for most.
3. Pareto Law explains… 80% of the problems.
Most people don’t need the depth at which a book goes into expanding on an idea.
The linearity of the book is a problem. You can’t decide what level of depth you want when reading. Perhaps, there is also an element of us not knowing how to read a book. We don’t need to read everything, but we need to skim through and find the bits we are interested in, even before buying it.
Essentially, the book is a more complex message than the blog post that might have been at its genesis.
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