I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

[sasha_fishter]

I noticed that I'm no longer reading an article, blog post, etc. I just scroll through it and close the page. It' really very rare that I spend time on some blog post, but I do read books, and I do it more than ever.

Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Are the books gaining popularity again? What are your thoughts?

[runjake]

I feel the opposite. I'm reading fewer non-fiction books and more articles and blog posts.

Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. A lot of the ideas presented in those books could be adequately presented in a 10th of the number of pages.

A huge time-saver has been reading the article versions of stuff that has been turned into a book. You get the same points, but in minutes instead of hours.

[allturtles]

> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book.

This applies to many non-fiction best-sellers in the self-help and pop science categories, but is very unfair as a generalization about non-fiction. (And bloat is not restricted to non-fiction, either: do we really need 10,000 pages of Wheel of Time or Stormlight Archive?).

I'm looking at my bookshelves now and see great books like Ryan's "A Bridge Too Far," Peltzold's "Code", Hodges' "The Enigma," Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers," Churchill's "Marlborough." None of these feel "bloated" or "padded" (okay maybe "Marlborough" is a little bloated). None of them were written to convey a handful of ideas to make you look smart at a cocktail party. Surely the information in these books could be condensed, but that condensed form wouldn't produce the same experience.

[ajmurmann]

I'm on the fence about this. For the longest time I'd have 100% agreed with you, but more recently realized that there is value in just having my mind be exposed to the subject for a prolonged amount of time. Sometimes the more interesting insights will be mine, rather than what the content of the book was. It also helps with retention. Of course some books just still aren't worth it. My canonical positive example would be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is a very high bar and obvious example.

[cryptos]

A good example for such a bloated book is "Clean Architecture" by Robert C. Martin. The ideas of the book are more or less completely explained in a single blog post or one of his talks (about 1 hour), but the book has a few hundred pages (432) where he delves into history and talks to you about how he used archaic computers 40 years ago (to render himself as a veteran and to underline some point in the main text).

Another book on the same topic (https://www.packtpub.com/product/get-your-hands-dirty-on-cle...) has only 156 pages and is far more useful in practice - but you'll learn less about the authors adventures in history.

[peepee1982]

I feel like this really depends on the topic.

When I see a 1000 page tome about every single feature of Photoshop, then nope. I'll google it thanks.

History is non-fiction, too. And I'd definitely rather read a book than some blog, because there will be a long thread of things that build up on each other, and I think books are just better suited for that.

So, things that require prolonged attention because of an overarching concept I'd rather read about in a book.

[sibeliuss]

For me its easy: Sitting on the computer reading makes me feel depressed. Reading books makes me feel happy. And so I've gradually reduced my footprint on the internet to basically zero -- no social media, only a few sites (mostly HN) bookmarked -- in an effort to make the internet less of a thing. It's working.

Sometimes I'm staring at my screen and I have no clue what to even do or where to go, and I close it and then pick up a book and instantly feel better.

[chairmanwow1]

I have been in a recent period of intense non-fiction book reading recently (6 / month for past 3 months) and I realized a couple of things:

1. High-quality writing relaxes me to the point that I can enjoy learning at a much deeper level

2. It’s extremely arduous to keep my BS filter constantly deployed, which it is 95% of the time I'm reading unfiltered content (blogs, Twitter, news etc)

A well-written book is a large lake of high-quality information, and so I can generally develop some trust for the author and can relax and think about things I don't know well.

There is a torrent of knowledge, but panning for wisdom is exhausting. So I think for me, rather than the form factor (blog vs book vs podcast), it really comes down to the level of refinement of the information. There are some authors that blog / write newsletters that I have developed a sense of trust for, so I can also enjoy their without the BS filter fully engaged. (Matt Levine, Ben Hunt, Scott Alexander etc)

[topaz0]

What you may notice from the other replies is that many of them conflict with each other. The reason is that this has much more to do with the rhythms of your own life and interests than with global trends. When I first started reading HN I would read several links a day. I don't think the quality of the links has changed that much -- indeed, many of the links are reruns that I've seen here 2, 5 or 10 years ago -- instead I have moved on to have more focused interests, and a higher level understanding in those areas, so that fewer of the posts are useful to me. (Meanwhile, I have much less time to read in general at my present stage of life, so I also read fewer books and magazines). I suspect there are also meaningful global trends, but extrapolating from your own experience will lead you astray.

[singedproxy]

This is a sensible take that could be applied to almost anything else in life with some exceptions. Do whatever works best for you, but don't generalize much outside of your practical experience.

[a13o]

I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense.

I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an actual blog post.

Tutorials are probably the most information dense things these days. Followed by podcasts, although the content marketers are actively trying to corrupt that medium.

[gorjusborg]

> I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas

I feel like this is very true for topics that are extremely shallow, like programming language frameworks.

Otherwise, I find that a good non-fiction book has no equal when it comes to transferring a nuanced mindset or base understanding from the author to the audience.

A tutorial is nice for what it is, a way to quickly become a beginner. Books at their best can give you so much context around they how and why that is very difficult to build by scouring the web for short form content.

I do agree, though, that bad books are insidious time wasters. I've had to find ways to quickly identify if I'm reading one of those, and I apply that process any time I start a big book (I also tend to search out opinions on good books from others before I ever have the book in my hands).

[vippy]

I also found this to be true. "Thought leaders", individual personalities as experts, etc. However: there are mountains of really good non-fiction books if you're willing to get a little boring. I've started digging heavily into mathematics and philosophy, and found Walter Rudin, Richard McElreath, and Nancy Cartwright. I read Bree Fram's With Honor and Integrity: Transgender Troops in their Own Words. I basically survive by a few curated Twitter accounts, the Washington Post and AP, and good books these days. The web today feels like too much content, too much manipulation, too little value, too little time.

[blisterpeanuts]

When studying history in university, I reveled in the deep, meaty kind of books I had to pore through, loaded with facts and arguments on every page, thick with footnotes and tempting bibliographic references to follow.

I had to take copious notes to make sense of the mass of information, to organize it in a way that my brain could take in, and to glean the facts needed for my research papers.

In some cases, I had to dispute the historian's arguments, which required even more concentration to get inside the head of a scholar who was backing up their statements with 20-30 years or more of research and learning.

That's what I think of as real writing! Then we have fiction (fantasy and science fiction have always been my preferences) that allows us to lose ourselves in a brilliantly described world created by an incredible imagination and lovingly crafted.

Modern writing... yeah, not quite as seductive, though once in a while one can find some very interesting stuff on substack or medium (or here on HN for that matter). There's always more to learn.

[wellanyway]

> most information dense things these days. Followed by podcasts

Funny you should say that. I can't bring myself to listen to any because of all of the filler and gimmicks.

[jrm4]

An odd pleasure of mine that I've subconsciously developed a way to sniff out is "self-help books that are a genuine effort from the author, regardless of whether they're precise or intelligent or verifiable."

You have to watch out for the ones who want to start a business or a cult, but it will be something like "Check out my new system of psycho-cyber-kinetics" and it's just "be kind to people." I imagine a lot of people wouldn't be into this but I love it.

If you've seen the show Severance, the for now imaginary "The You you are" would be a perfect example of this (and I'm hoping they really write it.)

It's not so much for the quality of the content, but for the...feel?

edit:

The more I think about it, I'm realizing I probably do this as an antidote to social media? Social media being "quick, not very thoughtful, hot takes, often unkind" and the above is the opposite?

[levesque]

Every medium has its gold nuggets. A lot of podcasts are garbage, even amongst the ones with interesting topics -- nothing more than a few bros hanging out and improvising on a topic with a little preparation. There are some very high quality podcasts in the mix, and the same is true of non-fiction books.

[wintermutestwin]

>the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense.

I got a subscription to Blinkist this year and use these ~20min audio summaries to determine if I think it is worth slogging through the whole book for more detail. It rarely is with modern non-fiction. I read most non-fiction to absorb information and learn new ideas, not for the joy of reading - that's what fiction is for. Of course the genre of non-fiction book is usually indicative of how much it is full of blaa blaa anecdotes, etc. Blinkist is at its best when listening to self improvement for example.

[WA]

Similar here. If a non-fiction book interests me, I check out the table of contents, try to derive the content from this and read a bunch of reviews on goodreads.com

Most of the time, it's clear that there's not much more in the book.

[grvdrm]

I'm not off non-fiction entirely but I do agree with one variation: I don't read non-fiction books that are written as prescriptive "do this to succeed" business advice. Nothing turns me off more quickly. Those books are right up there with top-X lists or "do this to succeed" twitter threads.

[Veen]

There are crappy books, and there are excellent books. I find that business and self-books in particular match your description, and sometimes popular science books. But not well-regarded histories and biographies.

[hgsgm]

You seem to be referring to "pop" nonfiction books about one specific claim, not biography or history or a textbook or a monograph. There are many great accessible nonfiction books, like those from Isaacson or Gleick.

What makes such a nonfiction book different from a fiction book, which is usually just a bag of tropes?

[bitexploder]

I started writing a real blog. My mindset is notes to myself. A place to collect my own writings and thoughts that I myself would like to refer back to that I also don’t mind sharing. It is almost entirely for myself, but I might as well make what I can public, maybe someone finds it interesting.

[twapi]

> I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas

Totally agree with you on this. Best example of this is much hyped "Atomic Habits". I appreciate this book's ideas, and have huge respect for the author.

[robjan]

It depends on the type of book. Tutorials are more like recipes from a recipe book, they help you achieve a specific outcome but don't necessarily teach the underlying reason or background information.

[50yearsold]

Agreed. Recently started reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott and truly - it could be written as (maybe a longish) a blog post than fluff that's been added to the book.

[beej71]

> I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense.

(One trick here is to buy short/small non-fiction books.)

Looking at books to use in class, I'm constantly surprised at how many words they use to convey so few concepts. Teaching is an optimization problem, and if you're optimizing for something else (e.g. making money), the teaching is likely to suffer.

For that reason, you're right on about distrusting blog posts. A lot of them are written in order to make money. Sometimes they also teach.

Not that there's anything wrong with getting paid for your work. I've made a great deal of capitalist money doing various things. But I also believe that I should make my money doing something else, and use that to fund the information-sharing portion of my life.

When it comes to teaching, I don't demand anything from my students or readers. At least not directly--students still pay tuition, and some of that goes to me. But all the ebooks and materials I write are free to use and have no ads and no tracking. The only goal is to teach as efficiently as possible, and no have money enter the picture.

Again, if one wants to make money with your blog or videos or whatever, I'm not judging. My personal ethic prohibits it for me, but of course people are free to do what they want. I just tend to value sites without advertising more than those with.

So I guess I am judging. :)

[elias94]

Books are curated content that has been reviewed by editors and are usually well written. Better if the books is printed by a relevant publishing company and even better if the book has been translated which usually means is relevant. Also there are so many books and so many topics to read that is impossible to get bored.

Articles are easy to produce and publish, there's no review and often are just another way to do self/brand promoting without real content. Good blogs are difficult to spot and to keep track. At the same time articles can give you the sense of a trend and what people are thinking, and the point of view of a niche of people.

So to give a time-quality ratio; socials < blogs/articles < books

[woolion]

I think formats are better suited to express certain types of ideas than others ("the medium is the message"). Blogposts tend to be ideal to express fairly short, singular ideas. Books should develop an entire thought system and connect various ideas, which take much longer, both in producing and consuming. The range of what you can express is also much more expanded, since you need the person to be in the right state of mind to understand or accept an idea; with a book, you can slowly lead them to that state.

Compared to a few years ago, I don't remotely have the same enthusiasm I could have for blogposts, and on the contrary I often find the writing style to be irritating -- especially hyperlinks-rich ones, which break the flow of thought, like internalized distractions. Yet I've also started to write my own blogposts because there are some ideas that I wanted to express in that form and did not find on the internet.

My guess, based on my own experience: you have reaped what you could from the ideas that can conveniently be expressed in blogposts, and it would be very hard to find new ones that would enrich your worldview. You have to go deeper, thus find the format that is more suitable for this.

[sasha_fishter]

Yes! It seems that blog posts are 90% written for self promotion, or to express thoughts so we can save them somewhere for later.

[dpkrjb]

The trap in hyperlink rich blogs is clicking every link the moment you come upon it and essentially depth first read your way through an idea.

[evanwise]

To be fair, sometimes a single idea is difficult enough that it deserves an entire book.

[rlgth]

I no longer read blog posts because they got worse. There are no longer any active quality bloggers like Steve Yegge or Joel Spolsky.

Employee blog posts from Big Tech now push the corporate agenda. Stepping out of line "has consequences", so no one speaks freely any more.

Self employed people are afraid of being crushed by Big Tech if they dissent. The result are blogs that are as interesting as reading the Pravda.

Purely technical blogs got unfocused in presentation, are largely self-promotional and rarely address interesting subjects.

[NikolaNovak]

Depends how you define "Blog Post". There are web pages / articles I still read - I'll check out things by Derek Sivers, Patrick McKenzie/Bits About Money, Money Stuff by Matt Levine, all by local HN recommendations. Similarly, I find a lot of good one-off recommendations on HN; is the hit ratio 100%, or even 50%, goodness no. But signal-to-noise ratio is still worth my time. I will read Thom Hogan on photography more than weekly. Science Babe's blogs/posts are interesting enough, as well as other more "traditional" science / astronomy bloggers.

I actually read a lot LESS books than I used to. I was an avid book reader; but several things happened: 1. My time is significantly reduced by being a 43year old with kids, work, house, mortgage 2. I've read a lot, so it's.... harder to find a new idea in a book, that interests me, especially one that's worth a few hundred pages or rather has hundreds of pages of (to me) new/interesting stuff. Basically, my attention span / my ability to devote dozen hours / the value I need to extract out of each our has changed.

I agree that there's a lot of useless posts; they've been increasing in ratio for years; and now with AI I'm sure they'll increase that much more. But individuals (and even teams) who produce quality content still exist. Heck, it's not a blog, but I've literally just discovered Tom Scott on Youtube - how did I miss that for the last 5-8 years?? I'm sure there are equally great bloggers out there I've clueless of. There's definitely opportunities in helping us identify them.

[Baxxter]

As others have said, books and articles have a different purpose and audience. I enjoy reading books. But there are many, many good blogs and online periodicals that offer quality that you would not want to find in a book. For instance...

What I don't enjoy - and have quickly learned to avoid - is this certain type of non-fiction book that ought to be an article or blog post. They're easy to find now, they're usually just shy of or right at 300 pages, they have a catchy core idea and they tend to expound on that idea about as much as a blog post would. The rest is just there to service the notion of having a book. Ugh. They were I think a bigger problem 3-4 years ago, but maybe that's because I've gotten better at avoiding them.

[levesque]

The brevity can be an advantage, I'd much prefer a dense 200-300 page essay to a long drawn out 500-page argument where the author loses both themselves and the reader. But I agree that some of those non-fiction books can be poorly written -- or thought out? They sometimes read like a string of supporting evidence for the author's hypothesis, while blatantly disregarding the evidence that does not support the argument.

[dredmorbius]

There's a strong element of "now" vs. "then" both being expressed in this thread and in my own experience of various media, where contemporary media seems ... low in reward:effort ratio, which can be said of both online and dead-tree published media.

Which raises two caveats:

1. This isn't uniformly the case, and there is in fact excellent writing in all formats, though I would suggest it's getting harder to find especially by way of keyword / content-based Web search (as opposed to searching by specific title, author, or organisation).

2. There's a heck of a lot of nostalgia, survivorship, and other bias at play here. There are a great many badly-written old books and articles as well. We tend to remember the ones that are in fact good, and those also tend to be the ones most recommended. I'm struck by how old the works on curated lists of best books (fiction or nonfiction) are, especially in light of how vastly more works have been published in the 20th and 21st centuries relative to all prior time.

So, yes, there are a lot of overly-padded books which are really pretentious magazine articles, and much poorly-written copy in news and magazine stories as well. I definitely notice this and try to turn away from the form when I realise I'm reading it.

(The assessment cost of determining whether or not a text is worth reading is among the nonrecoverable costs of an overactive reading habit.) I read enough older news and magazine copy to feel reasonably confident that the problem isn't entirely in my head: writing, even within the same publications or classes of works, seems to be getting worse, with efforts to precisely attribute every last statement or source being one notable part of that within news pieces.)

That said, I too have been tending strongly toward books and more-traditional print sources (journals, magazines) than online media. The problem with the latter is that the early promise of removed editorial gatekeepers has evolved toward its rather predictable end-state: the slush pile has migrated from the editor's desk to our browser and smartphone, and we're left with the challenge of wading through dreck in search of rare gems.

It's also hard to avoid the allure of novelty and mystery. I keep having to remind myself that the odds of the best or most relevant works of all time having been written within the past 24 hours are low at best. And without unnecessarily reifying the past, there's a lot of wisdom in old works, as well as the benefit that any pressing alternate incentives for publication are now largely stripped of their manipulative capabilities. Even reading old magazines and newspapers, the advertising tends to feel quaint or charming rather than urgent. This holds even when reading works I had read at the time a decade or four ago, suggesting it's less the advertising itself than the liveness of the attempted ad-verting of my attention that's salient.

I also am finding myself relying far more on bibliographic rather than Web search to turn up materials. Not exclusively, and HN itself plays a large role. But when I find a work referenced elsewhere --- whether in an HN comment, as a podcast comment or show note, or as a mention, citation, or note in a book or paper --- those referenced works tend to have far more salience than what Google or DDG-fronted Bing suggest to me.

(I've serious regrets that Worldcat, the only global Union Catalogue I'm aware of, seems to have, seems to have gone Full Spyware: <https://twitter.com/libraryprivacy/status/157018300668967322...>. Library catalogues are otherwise generally excellent guides. I may simply have to start using university or large-public-library search tools directly.)

[gherkinnn]

It is a question of quality. I'll take anything that is well written and insightful.

Posts like the Expert Beginner series [0] and anything ACOUP [1] I'll read and re-read. I keep a list of articles that have shaped my way of thinking. Most of what is on Medium et al can be discarded. Similarly, large amounts of books, mainly non-fiction, can be lobbed on the same pile. Many of which would have been better off as an article in the first place.

0 - https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

1 - https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...

[JohnBooty]

    Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many?

Yes, but...

    What are your thoughts?

I think it's inarguable: 99.x% of blog posts are trash, and a lot of that trash is specifically SEO-bait trash where the author wasn't even trying to produce something of value.

That said, the remaining 0.x% of blog posts is insanely valuable. The low-stakes environment of blog posts (and tweets, etc) sometimes facilitates great insights you would never find in a book.

Practically speaking, my solution is to only read things that have been (1) shared by people I trust and/or (2) upvoted by a community like HN.

[Georgelemental]

If everyone followed your solution, nobody would ever read any interesting blog posts!

[fullshark]

The amount of poor quality blogposts, in particular the volume of poor quality blogposts that are covert advertisements for something (a product, a book, the author's self image, the company they run, etc) just means you are very likely reading something that's a waste of time. I've adapted and find books to be more likely valuable information if not particularly fresh information.

[ploum]

That’s why I used Pocket and now Offpunk (disclaimer: it’s my own project).

When I find something that looks interesting, I place it in my "toread" list in offpunk. Then I go through that list, picking random articles and reading them… in less (the terminal pager).

It means no scrolling (hit space to display next page), no images, no cruft. Only text. I really read. And a majority of "looks interesting enough to read until the end" are in fact empty or soulless. Thankfully, following blogs through RSS + some gemini capsules, I’m never out of stuff to read. I start to build a relationship with the author, not expecting quick sugar but more a long term understanding of their work and their reflections. (I also read lot of books but I assume we are speaking of computer reading here).

The big takeaway is that, in a browser, I’m not really looking for stuff to read. I’m in fact looking for the dopamine rush of finding something that could be potentially interesting if I take the time to read it. This is frightening: it’s like spending more time watching trailers than watching a good movie (wait… that’s exactly what we are doing with my wife).

For those interested: https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/

[LunarAurora]

It is not just about the numbers. There are more books produced than ever.

For me, it is the ease of finding the "best" on a certain topic (by rating...). This is because books are more "centralized" (Amazon, goodreads...) and identifiable (isbn). Web Articles, on the contrary, are more often like an ever receding stream: blogs, monthly magazines, Hacker news feed...

Concerning centralization, I wish sites like longreads [1] and Lindy Hacker News [2] were more popular, wide-ranging and organized (tags, ratings...)

And with respect to identification, I wish there was the equivalent of DOI for web articles : You can easily find that influential scholarly paper from the 60s, but you may never recover that brilliant magazine article from the 2000s (and search is getting worse)

[1] https://longreads.com/

[2] https://hn.lindylearn.io/

[bamboozled]

I've got this new strategy where I just leave a few books around the house and I've building a habit where I just reach for a book instead of my phone.

It's personally been quite effective, albeit very simple.

Funnily enough, I just finished a book without replacing it and I'm straight back on the phone :)

Anyone else try this?

[sasha_fishter]

Interesting idea. I usually have books on the shelf that can be easily reached. Also I read every day, and after a few months it is just a habit. I like the feeling when I focus only on the book. Even though I don't have distraction from tech and other stuff, I have my mind to conquer. So it's easier just to fight with you mind than with mind and tech and all other distractions.

[digitalsushi]

Didn't this sentiment come with hypertext? If books had clickable links we'd have a difficult time finishing them.

It's just a different way to read. Both have very obvious, very ancient, strengths and weaknesses.

When you get sick of take out, you can go garden. When you get sick of gardening, get take out.

[dredmorbius]

Academic and some nonacademic books have citations and/or footnotes. Those can be followed, though with somewhat more effort than simply clicking a link. As a positive, however, proper citations rarely suffer linkrot, though some references are obscure, and if you're looking at ancient works, there may well be entirely lost works.

What I've found over the past decade or so as more books are available online (with varying levels of copyright compliance), it's possible to hit a reference and trace it often within a minute or so of searching. That's both delightful and something of a tarpit, reading lists can grow with amazing rapidity.

One of the first times I realised this was when reading through James Burke's Connections (companion book to the 1970s television series), and seeing a reference to Agricola's De re Metallica, a Renaissance-era text on mining and metallurgy still used as a reference through the 19th century.

Within a few minutes I located it (English translation, by an American couple, Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover) on the Internet Archive:

<https://archive.org/details/georgiusagricola00agri/page/n3/m...>

There's also a Project Gutenberg version: <https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/38015>

[gorjusborg]

> Didn't this sentiment come with hypertext? If books had clickable links we'd have a difficult time finishing them.

Absolutely!

I think that the hyper-twitch consumption model has become so ubiquitous that some people have forgotten how to slow down, though.

I prefer the slow model, personally, but I was born before the internet went big.

[fedeb95]

I have noticed the same, however my conclusion is different. Typically when you read a book, your average book has more signal than your average web article or blog post. That's because more filtering has happened, like time, editors, etc. sometimes I find good web content (mostly from the top HN posts) and I don't just scroll, but I read. When I find myself scrolling the first few lines, I immediately close the link.

[latexr]

> Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many?

There are a lot of books, too. More than one could read in a lifetime, even if new ones stopped being released. Thus it doesn’t follow that quantity is the problem, or that if it is you’ll eventually be bored by books too.

Years ago I started consuming dozens of books a year. I eventually realised most non-fiction are stretched-out pamphlets: one core idea which could fit into a blog post padded with anecdotes until it reaches book length. The overwhelming majority of productivity books—including the ones typically favoured by HN—fall into this category. A better use of time is to look for an online talk the author has given; you’ll get all the book’s important information faster without the fluff.

Books get boring too. Until you start to develop an eye for quickly identifying the duds so you can abandon them early (or not get them at all). When in doubt, the 2-star GoodReads reviews will typically spell out if a book suffers from too much fluff.

All this to say I don’t think it’s a “books VS blog posts” matter, there’s a ton of garbage in both mediums. Perhaps you’ve just read fewer books than blog posts. If you’re happier with books now, enjoy it.

(I’ve excluded fiction from the conversation because I imagine you’re not talking about blog posts with short stories.)

[ajsnigrutin]

There are good books and there are bad books... both subjectively and objectively. If a book is still bad (for me) after a few chapters of reading it, it stop reading it, because it's a waste of time. Usually I do atleast some research before starting reading a book, but sometimes even really high goodreads scores and recommendations from friends don't mean i'll personally like the book, and I'll still stop reading it.

Blog posts are another thing where there are many, many, many of them available, but basically zero reviews and recomendations from friends, and maybe, sometimes you get some quality-indicator if it's reposted here or on reddit and you see the upvote ratio... otherwise you never know what you'll going to get.

So, as with books, you read the first paragraph, sometimes you stop reading there, sometimes you scroll down and "read" vertically while scrolling (just looking at text to see if it contains something interesting) and many times it doesn't, so when you scroll to the bottom after 7 seconds of scrolling, you just close it and move on.

I don't see why this is a bad thing.

Some bloggers have gone to SEO optizimation schemes (as with recipes, where instead of a recipe, you get the authors childhood story first, then his family situation, what s/he likes to do on saturdays, etc..), some keep it short, some insert unneeded politcs everywhere, and some also manage to write something interesting and readable to the end. If you started reading books so often and unselectively as you do blogposts, you'd stop reading a lot more books too.