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Comment on Ask HN: How do you decide a non-fiction book is worth your time?parent

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So many books just pad with anecdotes. If I could get a "just the important anecdotes" version of a book, I absolutely would. Few isolated concepts that a single book is tackling (that isn't specifically for a specialized field) should be over 300 pages. Page count is an actual turn off of a book for me if it's a non-fiction "I want to learn this thing" kind of book. I'm not trying to waste that much time.

Now, if this is something like a software book and they cover a large amount of concepts, that's a different story, but if I'm reading a book like Jack Bogle's "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" (may have butchered that name), it should be short and to the point for the average reader. Leave the rest to an economics text book.

I think this is the idea behind blinkist.com

I used to get it as perk with my company and it wasn't an in depth analysis or anything but it covered the bases for such books in a way that felt useful

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