I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity.

What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various information feeds with blog posts, news articles, and projects relevant to my interests and the moment. I've come to prefer a more raw exposition of other people's thoughts. It seems partly in the interest of credibility; more spontaneous writing offers a richer surface area to judge the quality of thought. And finding it in a place where other people are free to critique and engage with those thoughts means that I'm not locked into just one voice. I also have the opportunity to engage myself which fundamentally changes how actively I think about it.

I'm open to the idea that the shift has come at a cost. There is value to reading something that someone has put a lot of work into and in large quantities. But the days when I felt it was enough to just passively let information flow over me seem to be over; it is a luxury I can't afford.

AI has come for those blog posts and news articles. There's very little incentive for people to invest in quality content anymore - I'm seeing things like this more with many others just quietly stopping: https://exploringjs.com/

I can understand how this makes sense for javascript frameworks and linux distributions but as an advid reader of non-fiction, I can't think of how this applies to almost anything else as it relates to books.

For most subjects, the deeper you go means you need to read more books if you are really learning something new.

Even arvix papers eventually lead me to a book I am not familiar with.

If something changes frequently, is it important to know? is the change inevitable or artificial?

I’ve learned to appreciate lasting things and ideas.

What is a book? I mean, I spent some time over the last couple of days reading parts of the PostgreSQL manual — if you printed it it would be a gigantic book but it's online and linked. Does that make it not a book? Half a book? Still a book?

A blog post can be a few hundred words or a hundred thousand. It can even be a series of blog posts. Is that now a book?

Fiction doesn’t age in the same way.