Sometimes I lament the fact that the Internet killed my appetite for long-form writing. I still like books and I buy a lot of them, but the majority sit unread on my bookshelf as a reminder of what I think I should read.

Then I realize that there’s really nothing special about book-length writing. I think most ideas can be expressed within a few thousand words. Even when I have occasionally read books in the past few years, books that are well-reviewed and carefully chosen as a likely enjoyable read, I have found that everything important is said in the first half or two thirds of the book, in fact often with a decent amount of redundancy.

The book is really a relic of the pre-Internet age, when people didn’t have easy access to background information about every topic imaginable and publishers’ business models centered on selling physical media and only secondarily the content they contained. It was sensible to include a lot of background information and redundancy to ensure that a book was accessible to the widest possible audience and to pad the size of the physical product, increasing its apparent value. Today, this is no longer the case. I feel that I have been much more broadly and better informed by reading thousands of blog posts, articles, and essays online than I would have been by reading a similar amount of writing in book form.

(I’m mostly talking about non-fiction books written for a non-specialist audience. I stopped reading fiction years ago, and academic tracts serve a different purpose.)