Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history?

I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.

I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.

An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.

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relativeadv 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> "Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?"

I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?

Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently understand things gestures generally than someone who gets everything from articles online.

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xphos 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think the major difference is that this article describes some meta concept. Despite being abstract its very concrete. If 2 people read something that is fantasy or even describing a physical process like wood carving. Despite reading the same thing both parties have an entirely different picture of what happened. The clothes on the people are different, the building they occupy is different, the wood you are carving is different, the tools you use are different. These difference are actually the most increasing details which your brain fills in, and this is something completely different from when you watch TV. All the details are filled its concrete and non-abstract. It can still be a compeling story or piece of art but often people are are much worst artist and visual things rarely capture all the things your brain can fill in for detail that make something cohesive. And the details they fill in are often details your brain finds mundane and ignores entirely.

I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).

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pseudonymidy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not familiar with the research but I will say that conclusion “feels” right to me.

Have they found a modern day metric that we should all be hunting in our quest for reading health? A literary equivalent to the daily 10,000 steps?

Maybe 10,000 words!

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There is also a weird, robust mortality relationship where book readers live longer than periodical readers "regardless of gender, health, wealth, or education" [1]. In those studies, the threshold was 30 minutes of book reading a day.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5105607/

	▲	hx8 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		While this is just a rule of thumb, I consider moderate exercise, reading, and socializing to be roughly equivalent in positive health benefits. I try to get a little bit of each every day, and then try to have longer sessions of each once or twice a week.

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sowbug an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Ten thousand books in an 80-year lifetime would mean finishing one book every three days. That's aggressive, but entirely achievable.

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Nevermark 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

How could less correlated reading, no matter how high the quality, possibly compare to a solid book - in use of time or depth of impact?

The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.

Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.

If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, with lower correlations of who finds them, reads them, and when, the page count would have to increase 10x - 100x. The setups and redundancy would be immense.

Books also get to explore many perspectives on the same important ideas. Which is not redundancy. It is the difference between recognizing a good idea and understanding it.

Feeling an epiphany vs. absorbing its implications. Awareness vs. fluency.

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bob_theslob646 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a great question. I would love to know the answer to this as well. +1

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hintymad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]