Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2022. The price of about 40 euros for Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor reflects the Spanish edition at that time.
Several companies have sprung up recently offering what at first glance looks like an excellent idea: sign up and get access to a whole series of book summaries. Some even add practical exercises at the end of each book (welcome back to school).
The message these platforms usually put out is basically: do you want to devour the content of 100 books in record time? How much do you think you’d thrive in life if, in just a few years, you had the content of more than 200 books in your head?
There’s no doubt that reading book summaries is much better than not reading any books at all. But it’s even better to spend whatever time you can reading a book, not a summary of one. Below I explain how, by relying on summaries, you’re basically wrecking the cognitive process that takes place in your brain when you read.
It’s true that we’re all short of time to read, and if instead of reading 2 books a month we managed to read 20, we’d gain a huge advantage in knowledge. But remember that knowledge isn’t everything. Knowledge on its own isn’t worth a damn. What matters is how you apply it.
Even so, I have my reasons for not recommending this practice.
Why I don’t recommend book summaries or audiobooks
The cognitive process that happens when you read
Reading puts both hemispheres of our brain to work and connects them: the left hemisphere (which handles phonology, semantics and adapting the message) and the right hemisphere (which handles the appropriateness of language, attention, concentration and orientation). Both hemispheres connect and coordinate to produce verbal memory, tone (when you give written words a tone of voice) and many other processes.
The right hemisphere also connects with the cerebellum. You could say that practically our whole brain is working when we read. That doesn’t happen in the same way when we listen to an audiobook.
A few facts about reading
Data, dates and explanations are easily forgotten within a few weeks or months. Stories, on the other hand, can stay in our brain for life, because our brain turns the stories we read into images and stores them more easily.
First, as a general rule, over time we won’t remember much of the content of the books we read. It’s said that we lose more than 50% of what we’ve read within a few months if we don’t go back to that information or if it isn’t firmly anchored in our brain through stories.
When it comes to articles or summaries, you can forget up to 90% of what you read in a very short time.
If you enjoy reading a book, you’re more likely to remember it.
Second, and I’m shooting myself in the foot here, there are studies claiming that an article along the lines of “10 ways to be more productive” is likely to be forgotten quickly unless you write those 10 points down and keep them in mind every week so you actually put them into practice. We have too much information but too little action when it comes to applying what we read.
And finally, when we recommend reading, we do it as a way to open your mind, something that also serves as entertainment and learning. If we approach reading as if we were studying, we’ll probably end up getting tired of reading.
See also: Books to open your mind and make you smarter
On top of all that, the truth is that a 600-page book has 600 pages for a reason, and it’s no accident. Its author decided it that way. The author could have written a 100- or 60-page summary instead.
Take Robert Cialdini’s Influence, for example, which has 376 pages. Could it have been cut down to 60 pages to extract its most vital concepts? Of course. In fact, I summarised it myself in an article called “8 ways to influence people“, breaking down every point Cialdini covered.
See also: These are the 3 books I gave myself for Christmas
If you’re a regular reader and haven’t read the book, I’m sure you won’t remember the points I covered in that article. If you have read the book, I’m absolutely certain you won’t remember most of the points, but you will remember some of the stories Cialdini told, such as the jewellery shop employee who made a mistake and raised the price of the jewellery instead of lowering it, and thanks to that mistake, managed to sell it.
We learn through stories, we learn through anchors
There are stories in books that act as anchors for learning, because the story contains the lesson. Sometimes a part of a book matters to us that doesn’t matter at all to someone else.
I’m an avid reader. Right now I have 11 books waiting to be read and I’m itching to find the time for them. Clearly, if I used summaries I’d get through those 11 books in the time it would take me to read 2.
But reading relaxes me, I learn by reading, I gain knowledge, and I love stories. I like reading the things that might not matter to most people but that the author felt were important to tell. And if it was important to the author, I want to get to know it in depth.
This ties in with another problem readers have been facing lately.
Paper books or e-books?
Paper, without a doubt. If I remember correctly, we’ve already had this debate here. I can’t remember where I read a study saying that people now have 500 books on a device but don’t even get through 30% of a book. In fact, roughly 70% of people who use electronic devices to read never finish a single book.
And this has a lot to do with the gift effect. E-books are often obtained for free or very cheaply. The result: people don’t value them.
And since we like stories, here’s one based on real events.
I used to give The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham as a present to people who were interested in investing in the stock market. Funnily enough, almost nobody read it. So I started recommending it without giving it away. In other words, I’d get the book for them, but they had to pay me the nearly 40 euros it cost. And funnily enough, they all read it. Let’s just say that this second group felt obliged to read it because they had spent a fair amount of money on a book.
Basically, that’s what tends to happen to most people who buy e-books instead of paper books.
Why a paper book isn’t really more expensive than an e-book
Most readers who buy books in electronic format do so because of the price. And yes, it could also be because they’re short of space at home or don’t want to lug 20 kilos of books around on holiday.
But if price is the reason, the truth is that paper books work out cheaper than e-books, because we can sell paper books on as second-hand books at some point. We can’t do that with e-books.
That said, as I always say, this is just my personal opinion.
See also: The 10 best personal development books I’ve read
Featured image: Pete Birkinshaw, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
