I think the book will survive. There is a level of thematic integration that you can get with a book that you cannot get at the level of an essay or blog post. But maybe there will be fewer books and maybe that's good.
Books have an important role in imparting knowledge. At present I am learning about Russia’s history from 300 AD to the present with the help of two books:
Restless Empire, A Historical Atlas of Russia by Ian Barnes
Russia: Myths and Realities, by Rodric Braithwaite
I am reading both books together, chronologically. You cannot achieve this kind of knowledge by just reading Substack. Moreover, you need the background information in order to make judgments about the current conflict in the Ukraine.
Add to this trying to learn Latin, Spanish and linear algebra and you quickly find life is impossible without books.
The main problem is the norm that nonfiction books have ~50,000 words (~200 printed pages).
The concern seems to be that book buyers won't feel like they are getting "their money's worth" for a shorter book, so authors have to pad out their ideas with additional examples, exposition, speculation about the future, etc. to hit the target length.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I would happily pay *more* for a short book with the key information condensed into ~15,000 words or fewer (~50 pages).
I don't find Substack especially information-dense once you account for the time required to find and filter new posts. Many Substack authors start out strong - they have a couple of key ideas that summarize ~decades of thinking and experience. But once they work through their "big ideas", many of them drop in quality or frequency. A common pattern is for Substack posts to become more "reactive" - writing takes in response to news, current events, etc.
Given the quality distribution of posts, I don't think the monetization model really works. A Substack author's best posts might be "valued" at >100x the value of a later link roundup or reaction to the news. But they collected the same $5/$10/whatever for both months.
Substack might be more information-dense if there were:
- An active and reliable ecosystem of "post reviews" (similar to book reviews) and curated lists of the best posts, not just the best newsletters.
- Less friction to buy just the best posts. You can subscribe and immediately churn, but it's a cludgy experience.
As usual, Arnold presents an interesting proposition; Substacks are better than books because more information dense. But some subjects require a sustained argument that if not in book form would need many Substack posts, and it is certainly much more convenient to have them all collected in one work. The book allows focus and rapid checking back to previous text, helpful and sometimes essential when reading difficult material.
So while I am quite enthusiastic about Substacks, I think it is going too far to see them eclipsing books.
I'm skeptical of non-fiction books, mostly because 95%+ of them are completely made up. There is too much incentive to take a non-replicable pop-science finding and stretch it into 300 pages of entertainment. Maybe I need to get better at selecting non-fiction but I almost always walk away feeling stupider, or at least that I've wasted my time.
Substack is broader than books, by far, tho also a bit distracting. It's especially good for we "Jacks of all (intellectual) trades". But substack will not allow any to become a master. Books and work on depth in some field do that.
Twitter is especially distracting. In the last week, while mostly lying on my bad back to avoid sitting, I spent more time than usual on Twitter, but it was mostly infoTAINMENT, or even more RAGEotainment, so your critique of Twitter is more true than Tyler's support -- I'm guessing he doesn't quite read the many tweet lines he semi-sees & skips, so doesn't include them in his density calc.
Best book read in 2022 was Wrangham's 2020 book: "The Goodness Paradox" on human evolution of cooperation AND coordinated violence. Great book for discussion.
You, Rob Henderson, Hanania, and many others should certainly consider making a self-published or small publisher book publishing of some 100-150 pages of essays. Your 105 page third edition of The Three Languages of Politics (gift of my daughter!) was excellent, along with another 50 pages of notes, further reading, appendix.
Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" (one of my 2022 presents , not yet read) is a much longer 243 bigger pages, denser font - almost certainly with more repetition than is optimal. But such books do provide a good amount of "Serious Intellectual" signaling, to many. Probably 99% of the signal, and info (99.9%?), at only 50% of the size would be possible. More substackers doing this would push this along.
I want to nominate Freddie for either or both a book discussion and a live talk. I was about to stop subscribing to him because he's a Marxist, but he recently wrote: "Be Independent! No, Not Like That"
Those not smart enough to signal to others that they're smart enough to signal effectively, are most likely not so smart that one misses great insights by not following them. [In "Take No Prisoners", live Lou Reed album, he puts down a heckler: "If you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you."]
Books are almost all more info dense than podcasts, which is why I strongly prefer transcripts.
When Kling says he's reading fewer books, this is political op-ed books.
Math textbooks for grad students are extremely information dense. A common complaint is that the books are too dense, and explanations are too terse. Most students reading the books, often ask, "how did the author just jump from step A to step B?"
On this take I have to disagree with you, Kling. Yes, there is a genre of non-fiction book where they take hundreds of pages where an essay of 10 would have sufficed. Often, academics end up writing this type of book, because they have a bunch of papers they want to publicize and their publisher want a normal length book, not some skimpy rag.
But some (non-fiction) books provide learning and insight that no blog or podcast or journal article can match. Many (auto)biographies are like this. Some economics classics are like this (including Wealth of Nations IMO, some books on history of thought, and books on particular industries).
I (grad student) always look first to the internet (including journals) to do research, but so often it takes a great book to really sort things out.
This brush is too broad. Some university press books are still very dense. But what one might call "Barnes and Nobles non-fiction" frequently fail to attract my serious attention. They are pretty thin, and perhaps have been trending thinner and thinner for some time now. It's disconcerting to me that so many social science books revolve around the same 50 or 100 papers. Publishers, writers, and readers value thick argumentation about as much as they tolerate equations. "Each equation divides readership by 10".
For me the form factor of a book goes a long way. I like being able to relax away from my devices. What if Substack published "best of" books in various different topic areas, consisting of top posts (fact-checked and revised) from top bloggers? That could get the best of all worlds.
It is a complicated & interesting question. I don't know that I'd say that either medium is more or less inherently information dense. A lot of "information density" boils down to literacy and the reader's ability to parse and digest what they are consuming, but also I think the different mediums each have aspects that dramatically influence how content engaged through them is metabolized and retained (or not)?
The medium of the browser doesn't always always lend itself to deep, focused reading - the style of many readers is simply to "browse" / skim, and I suspect that while many people scroll through a lot of content during their day, much of it goes in one eye and out the other, so to speak. There is a temptation to treat the internet as this all-you-can-eat buffet of information, and some people can metabolize it at extremely impressive levels, for many I think it's not uncommon to retain very little due to the skimming-style of reading, built-in distractions on the computer (email, etc), and temptation to over-consume / not balance with sufficient reflection (ie digestion). Reading a physical book is something people, on average I think, tend to 'make time' for, versus browser reading, which probably tends to fill time, its function largely a ready-at-hand way to kill the 10 - 15 minutes of 'non-time' that exists between two zoom meetings.
Personally it is easier for me to "linger" on a book than it is on an online piece. The physicality of books also makes them (arbitrarily) easier to revisit than online articles, thanks to the nature of online content remaining more 'out of sight / out of mind' than a book on a bookshelf I walk past every day. I think here the information density of books in terms of being able to re-read them and gain new perspective or insight has an edge over browser-accessed material, maybe most notably in promoting appreciation for the notion that reading is not a binary "read" vs "haven't read" state; one can read the same thing many times and come away with new insights, understandings, etc, regardless of the medium. One cannot 'read' anything and come away having completely 'unpacked' all the information within, as the insights of subsequent readings can only be unlocked after completing (and taking the time to deliberate upon & digest) the first reading. Online content feels more disposable in this regard.
Online content however certainly has accessibility & velocity in its favor; I may get excited for a book, order it off Amazon, and even in the 2-day delivery window my interest may wane sufficiently that it then sits on a shelf for six months before I get to it. Online content obviously doesn't have to compete with that same latency; an article that gets my attention now is more likely to be read (even if skimmed) now.
Obviously much of the above is generalization from my own personal experience, and mileage for everyone may vary. Information density is a hugely interesting topic precisely because text seems to be a relatively high-investment medium; one must make the effort to slow down and deliberately engage, and have the vocabulary and background of being sufficiently well-read in the first place to extract or unpack a particularly information-dense piece of work, whether in published book form or online. And of course it will be interesting to see how AI functions as a 'CliffsNotes for everything' with regard to helping us digest and synthesize huge volumes of information from a variety of sources, mediums and languages (written text being just one).
The analogue nature of books has too many advantages to die out to Substack. Interestingly, I’ve been reading more books and less Substack lately and found that to be more enjoyable. Maybe I’m less “interested in ideas”, but I feel anxious after reading Substack.
It is useful here to remember why books were originally designed. They were not designed to be efficient transmitters of information-dense material. They were designed to be a more space and resource-efficient alternative to scrolls. In other words, they only exist because of the logistical limits of the Gutenberg era (and earlier).
Books can not hyperlink; Substacks can. Books often put an overwhelming and distracting amount of information in your visual field; Substacks don't
Books were humanity's greatest repository of knowledge for centuries, and for that we should be grateful for them. But they are not efficient methods of transmitting knowledge. I hope we move on to better means of knowledge-transmission. For that reason, I am looking into working with educators and tech founders to develop a child-friendly alternative to textbooks that works as a better method of learning.
Non-fiction books took a big step down in my time allocation when podcasts came out. Listening to a thoughtful interview with a n author for an hour got me enough grounding in key concepts that I often felt fine skipping the book. Substack is maybe an in between. So far, big fan.
Another point, re: “I wish that Tyler Cowen would switch his essays to Substack.”
The search function on Substack is not nearly good enough for this yet. It is much easier to find interesting old posts on MR as currently constituted.
I think the book will survive. There is a level of thematic integration that you can get with a book that you cannot get at the level of an essay or blog post. But maybe there will be fewer books and maybe that's good.
Books have an important role in imparting knowledge. At present I am learning about Russia’s history from 300 AD to the present with the help of two books:
Restless Empire, A Historical Atlas of Russia by Ian Barnes
Russia: Myths and Realities, by Rodric Braithwaite
I am reading both books together, chronologically. You cannot achieve this kind of knowledge by just reading Substack. Moreover, you need the background information in order to make judgments about the current conflict in the Ukraine.
Add to this trying to learn Latin, Spanish and linear algebra and you quickly find life is impossible without books.
The main problem is the norm that nonfiction books have ~50,000 words (~200 printed pages).
The concern seems to be that book buyers won't feel like they are getting "their money's worth" for a shorter book, so authors have to pad out their ideas with additional examples, exposition, speculation about the future, etc. to hit the target length.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I would happily pay *more* for a short book with the key information condensed into ~15,000 words or fewer (~50 pages).
I don't find Substack especially information-dense once you account for the time required to find and filter new posts. Many Substack authors start out strong - they have a couple of key ideas that summarize ~decades of thinking and experience. But once they work through their "big ideas", many of them drop in quality or frequency. A common pattern is for Substack posts to become more "reactive" - writing takes in response to news, current events, etc.
Given the quality distribution of posts, I don't think the monetization model really works. A Substack author's best posts might be "valued" at >100x the value of a later link roundup or reaction to the news. But they collected the same $5/$10/whatever for both months.
Substack might be more information-dense if there were:
- An active and reliable ecosystem of "post reviews" (similar to book reviews) and curated lists of the best posts, not just the best newsletters.
- Less friction to buy just the best posts. You can subscribe and immediately churn, but it's a cludgy experience.
As usual, Arnold presents an interesting proposition; Substacks are better than books because more information dense. But some subjects require a sustained argument that if not in book form would need many Substack posts, and it is certainly much more convenient to have them all collected in one work. The book allows focus and rapid checking back to previous text, helpful and sometimes essential when reading difficult material.
So while I am quite enthusiastic about Substacks, I think it is going too far to see them eclipsing books.
I'm skeptical of non-fiction books, mostly because 95%+ of them are completely made up. There is too much incentive to take a non-replicable pop-science finding and stretch it into 300 pages of entertainment. Maybe I need to get better at selecting non-fiction but I almost always walk away feeling stupider, or at least that I've wasted my time.
Substack is broader than books, by far, tho also a bit distracting. It's especially good for we "Jacks of all (intellectual) trades". But substack will not allow any to become a master. Books and work on depth in some field do that.
Twitter is especially distracting. In the last week, while mostly lying on my bad back to avoid sitting, I spent more time than usual on Twitter, but it was mostly infoTAINMENT, or even more RAGEotainment, so your critique of Twitter is more true than Tyler's support -- I'm guessing he doesn't quite read the many tweet lines he semi-sees & skips, so doesn't include them in his density calc.
Best book read in 2022 was Wrangham's 2020 book: "The Goodness Paradox" on human evolution of cooperation AND coordinated violence. Great book for discussion.
You, Rob Henderson, Hanania, and many others should certainly consider making a self-published or small publisher book publishing of some 100-150 pages of essays. Your 105 page third edition of The Three Languages of Politics (gift of my daughter!) was excellent, along with another 50 pages of notes, further reading, appendix.
Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" (one of my 2022 presents , not yet read) is a much longer 243 bigger pages, denser font - almost certainly with more repetition than is optimal. But such books do provide a good amount of "Serious Intellectual" signaling, to many. Probably 99% of the signal, and info (99.9%?), at only 50% of the size would be possible. More substackers doing this would push this along.
I want to nominate Freddie for either or both a book discussion and a live talk. I was about to stop subscribing to him because he's a Marxist, but he recently wrote: "Be Independent! No, Not Like That"
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/be-independent-no-not-like-that so I'm mostly just going to stop reading his negative comments.
Those not smart enough to signal to others that they're smart enough to signal effectively, are most likely not so smart that one misses great insights by not following them. [In "Take No Prisoners", live Lou Reed album, he puts down a heckler: "If you write as good as you talk, nobody reads you."]
Books are almost all more info dense than podcasts, which is why I strongly prefer transcripts.
When Kling says he's reading fewer books, this is political op-ed books.
Math textbooks for grad students are extremely information dense. A common complaint is that the books are too dense, and explanations are too terse. Most students reading the books, often ask, "how did the author just jump from step A to step B?"
On this take I have to disagree with you, Kling. Yes, there is a genre of non-fiction book where they take hundreds of pages where an essay of 10 would have sufficed. Often, academics end up writing this type of book, because they have a bunch of papers they want to publicize and their publisher want a normal length book, not some skimpy rag.
But some (non-fiction) books provide learning and insight that no blog or podcast or journal article can match. Many (auto)biographies are like this. Some economics classics are like this (including Wealth of Nations IMO, some books on history of thought, and books on particular industries).
I (grad student) always look first to the internet (including journals) to do research, but so often it takes a great book to really sort things out.
This brush is too broad. Some university press books are still very dense. But what one might call "Barnes and Nobles non-fiction" frequently fail to attract my serious attention. They are pretty thin, and perhaps have been trending thinner and thinner for some time now. It's disconcerting to me that so many social science books revolve around the same 50 or 100 papers. Publishers, writers, and readers value thick argumentation about as much as they tolerate equations. "Each equation divides readership by 10".
For me the form factor of a book goes a long way. I like being able to relax away from my devices. What if Substack published "best of" books in various different topic areas, consisting of top posts (fact-checked and revised) from top bloggers? That could get the best of all worlds.
Coincidentally, I was reading Richard Hannia making a similar argument yesterday:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books
It is a complicated & interesting question. I don't know that I'd say that either medium is more or less inherently information dense. A lot of "information density" boils down to literacy and the reader's ability to parse and digest what they are consuming, but also I think the different mediums each have aspects that dramatically influence how content engaged through them is metabolized and retained (or not)?
The medium of the browser doesn't always always lend itself to deep, focused reading - the style of many readers is simply to "browse" / skim, and I suspect that while many people scroll through a lot of content during their day, much of it goes in one eye and out the other, so to speak. There is a temptation to treat the internet as this all-you-can-eat buffet of information, and some people can metabolize it at extremely impressive levels, for many I think it's not uncommon to retain very little due to the skimming-style of reading, built-in distractions on the computer (email, etc), and temptation to over-consume / not balance with sufficient reflection (ie digestion). Reading a physical book is something people, on average I think, tend to 'make time' for, versus browser reading, which probably tends to fill time, its function largely a ready-at-hand way to kill the 10 - 15 minutes of 'non-time' that exists between two zoom meetings.
Personally it is easier for me to "linger" on a book than it is on an online piece. The physicality of books also makes them (arbitrarily) easier to revisit than online articles, thanks to the nature of online content remaining more 'out of sight / out of mind' than a book on a bookshelf I walk past every day. I think here the information density of books in terms of being able to re-read them and gain new perspective or insight has an edge over browser-accessed material, maybe most notably in promoting appreciation for the notion that reading is not a binary "read" vs "haven't read" state; one can read the same thing many times and come away with new insights, understandings, etc, regardless of the medium. One cannot 'read' anything and come away having completely 'unpacked' all the information within, as the insights of subsequent readings can only be unlocked after completing (and taking the time to deliberate upon & digest) the first reading. Online content feels more disposable in this regard.
Online content however certainly has accessibility & velocity in its favor; I may get excited for a book, order it off Amazon, and even in the 2-day delivery window my interest may wane sufficiently that it then sits on a shelf for six months before I get to it. Online content obviously doesn't have to compete with that same latency; an article that gets my attention now is more likely to be read (even if skimmed) now.
Obviously much of the above is generalization from my own personal experience, and mileage for everyone may vary. Information density is a hugely interesting topic precisely because text seems to be a relatively high-investment medium; one must make the effort to slow down and deliberately engage, and have the vocabulary and background of being sufficiently well-read in the first place to extract or unpack a particularly information-dense piece of work, whether in published book form or online. And of course it will be interesting to see how AI functions as a 'CliffsNotes for everything' with regard to helping us digest and synthesize huge volumes of information from a variety of sources, mediums and languages (written text being just one).
The analogue nature of books has too many advantages to die out to Substack. Interestingly, I’ve been reading more books and less Substack lately and found that to be more enjoyable. Maybe I’m less “interested in ideas”, but I feel anxious after reading Substack.
It is useful here to remember why books were originally designed. They were not designed to be efficient transmitters of information-dense material. They were designed to be a more space and resource-efficient alternative to scrolls. In other words, they only exist because of the logistical limits of the Gutenberg era (and earlier).
Books can not hyperlink; Substacks can. Books often put an overwhelming and distracting amount of information in your visual field; Substacks don't
Books were humanity's greatest repository of knowledge for centuries, and for that we should be grateful for them. But they are not efficient methods of transmitting knowledge. I hope we move on to better means of knowledge-transmission. For that reason, I am looking into working with educators and tech founders to develop a child-friendly alternative to textbooks that works as a better method of learning.
Non-fiction books took a big step down in my time allocation when podcasts came out. Listening to a thoughtful interview with a n author for an hour got me enough grounding in key concepts that I often felt fine skipping the book. Substack is maybe an in between. So far, big fan.
Another point, re: “I wish that Tyler Cowen would switch his essays to Substack.”
The search function on Substack is not nearly good enough for this yet. It is much easier to find interesting old posts on MR as currently constituted.