Strange history of books

What do we read and why do we read it? It there something we SHOULD read? Can our reading become toxic? Want to read more here, here, here, here, here, and here? Update: Sorry, some of the links are no longer active, and I do not know why.

Strange reading

The fact that somebody wrote a book does not mean we need to spend our time reading it. Today my wife showed me an article her student brought and complained she does not understand why anyone would read it. The article was about philosophy. It had a great word count, cool images, and an interesting title. The content could be better. The article was intended for people who briefly skimmed through certain subjects and want to know a bit more. There was not enough background for a novice and no original thoughts for an expert. As far as I am concerned, the article was written for SEO and SMO, not for real people.

Why on earth should you read articles, simply because their author invested in self-promotion? If someone considers himself smart, does it mean he offers enough real ideas to learn and evolve? Using emotionally charged and motivating words and providing zero actionable messages is another pitfall. It’s like reading endless articles about the poor state of something without any suggestions for improvement. Sad, really.

If the article or book does not contribute, simply do not read it!

Scarcity and abundance

Today there is an abundance of information because the information is cheap. We are having issues filtering the garbage. 500 years ago or before the situation was very different. There were very few books. It took one person a year to make one copy of one book. Books were treasured. If something was important enough to write, you could be sure it is important enough to be read. Only very few treasuries had above 1000 books. Something like the Library of Alexandria was a powerful magnet pulling the brightest and the most ambitious intellectuals.

Even after the invention of the printing press, books used to be rare, expensive, and cherished. The first mass-produced books were of religious nature and countless revolutions followed. Next came educational stories with a deep moral context. People respected the books as they would respect real mentors and teachers because the books extended these mentors and teachers to the masses. Not to everybody, but only to those who could read.

Later came political publications, free public libraries, and literacy for all. From the abundance of newspapers in the 19th century to the internet revolution we are attacked by exploding volumes of written texts. I read 3000 wpm if I want to remember, 20000 wpm if I want to forget, and still, I do not find time to read everything I want.

How everything started

The first books mostly dealt with military, legal, and accounting issues. Basically, if someone owed you money, you got promoted or your kingdom crushed opposition, you would like your children to know about it. These are not the books you would love to read, and reading was not about speed, joy or comfort. It was about ruling empires. Even today we probably have much more legal and accounting documentation than any other stuff, except probably the advertising.

The first books were not beautiful, they did not even have spaces and punctuation. The “teamei hamikra” kind of punctuation you see in Hebrew bibles was a late addition when people started to forget the language. The original bible contained many letters and no spaces or punctuation at all. The spaces were introduced by Irish monks. Still, our alphabet is much more comfortable for speedreading and accuracy than hieroglyphs. On the other hand, there were not many books or people who could read, so why make their job easier?

Most of the linguistic reforms from the renaissance to this day make books easier to read and write. Korean abandoned hieroglyphs long ago, which was a very smart move and resulted in a highly educated nation. Russian lost a third of its letters. German is slowly losing letters at a slower rate. I really see no point in the huge German words or a multitude of silent letters in French, but the academies seem to love them.

Everything is connected

A thousand years ago, very few people need to read anything except the bible. Now we have so much specialized literature that we do not see how different disciplines interconnect. Some projects, like Bill Gate’s Big History project, try to reinstall these connections. We should be able to grasp an entire subject as one, even when this requires “a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which … wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth. ”

When we start reading Aristotle, everything people know is nicely organized in very few books. The things that defied catalogs were put after the book of “physics” and were called “after physics” or as we know it metaphysics. Nobody can do something like that today. We start reading an article, and to understand it we need to read more articles. As the tree of referenced ideas grow we start to regret not taking the book. Yet, as we read books, we understand that they were outdated well before they were written, simply because the research they are built on had to undergo peer review, publication, social filtering to get the attention of the book writers, and collection by the book writers, editing process, again publication… By the time we read a book, the information it is built on is 8 years old. Not so long ago Pluto was a planet, and now we have a family of planetoids. Who could anticipate that? Other fields of knowledge change faster.

I only read books. Wrong!

Some people I know only read books because books can offer detailed, consistent, and apparently deep analysis. However, we bother to read books only when they come with high recommendations. And we bother to read recommendations only of people whose opinions we respect. I am talking about the filter bubble. Unless you read a large number of trendy articles, everything you read will reinforce your current viewpoint.

When I first started to teach myself psychology I read Freud because I knew about him. Then I read his students Adler and Young. At that point, I started to understand that psychology is something akin to mythology: cool but useless. About 10 years later I read studies claiming that all the forefathers of psychology were utterly unscientific. Fortunately, at that point, I was given working and scientifically sound methods (CBT). I did not rediscover psychology by reading books, I was reading blogs like businessinsider.

To be honest, I almost do not read books anymore. Books are great when you want to build a systematic picture for something you already kind of know. To read something new you should discover it first, and books are not great at being discovered. Blogs tend to be more SEO-friendly and diverse.

“How to” books

Modern science and industry were not built from the Bible. Instead, we rely on “how-to” books. In 21 century this would probably be the place to use Youtube instead. It does not matter. We do not keep our knowledge as a trade secret, except Coca Cola’s formula. Instead, we share it freely and earn money from adapting and interpreting this knowledge.

The initial comics were not about superheroes. There were books with detailed pictures of every trade, from embalming and fencing to construction and perfume making. People did not even have to read: everything was available in pictures. Wait, this is exactly like youtube.

Technology

The history of the printed word is also the history of technology. I quote:

True, the moralized world of the late Middle Ages did wane – but not due to the onslaught of reformed Christianity, as Weber would have it. Instead, it was eroded by the growth of technical literacy across all areas of culture, a consequence in turn of the rapid spread of the printing press. Within less than a century, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention had spread from Europe’s heartland to its most distant parts. In the early 16th century, Salamanca in Spain already had 52 printing presses and 84 bookshops.

When books were rare, they were read aloud to spread the word. Now we learn hard to suppress subvocalization and read faster. In the 19th-century people would spend hours with just one newspaper, now we spend about 30 min on a handful of blogs. To learn a craft, people would painstakingly notice every aspect of a cartoon. Now we have all the pyrotechnics we want on Youtube. Accounting was carefully kept on scrolls, and now it is secured in impenetrable blockchains.

We are not expected to read like 100 years ago, yet schools do not change fast enough to teach us the right skills. Some blogs do. (I do my best in this area)

People

While technology and language change, people change slower. About 3000 years ago, the western phonetic alphabet diverged from highly dense hieroglyphs. Yet this was not a clear win. I quote:

English and Chinese are, by and large, read at the same speeds. In one study, both languages were read at approximately the same rate—English at 382 words per minute and Chinese at the equivalent of 386 words per minute. A statistical tie. Another study found the percentage of times a person moves backward in a text—a sign the person is having trouble processing the words—to be about the same for English and Chinese.

The limiting factor is not the language or the technology, but how we use them. We need to choose our content and become very effective in using it. One of the complaints I get: people learn to read text x4 their previous speed and remember everything, yet they need the same time to process a book. With extra skills they have much more material to think of, and more lessons to learn from each book.

Metrics

Can we address reading by such metrics as return on investment, reading speed, and retention ratio? We definitely try to do this to provide our students with some form of gamification and reduce possible confusion. The reality is always more complex. Different people behave in different ways with certain materials. Some enjoy reading poems aloud, while others do not understand this pleasure. Businessmen analyze huge sheets of numbers very quickly, yet for most of us, this information is meaningless. Lawyers can argue for hours about a single word and its meaning in a particular context. Mathematicians often read pages upon pages of mathematical symbols. I could never speedread real math (above Ph.D. level), and I do not think anyone should: either read the proofs carefully or skip the proofs.

The history of books is the history of what people cannot afford to forget. As we change, so do our books.