Tell me why: Reading or listening to book summaries will not suffice
In the fast-paced world where hustling is inevitable and time-management strategies are rampant, people tend to optimize their lifestyle to reap the most of it. Under such circumstances many readers tend to fall back on reading or listening to book summaries to get the gist of the book especially in the self-help section. But Math has proved that the shortest distance is not always the straight line⁰ between two points or the best possible route. Book summary services such as GetAbstract, Blinkist, optimize etc are on the rise.
But here are some of the reasons why skimming through the book summaries as an alternative to reading the entire self-help book is a blunder especially in the pretext of saving time and apparently getting to read more.
Storytelling is an art
Reading a book is a journey and each and every word is vital in connecting the dots of the story to form a bigger picture. Self-help books do not have a distinct “storyline” per se, but they do have a sequence that the author of the book has deemed essential for the completeness of the plot. The lucidity of the contents is the crux of storytelling.
If it wasn’t the storytelling that was crucial for a movie, then most fairytales would end up as a one liner: The Prince met the Princess and they lived happily ever after.
Too much in too little
The undue mental pressure while reading a few pages long summary where each and every bullet point is a critical takeaway from the book makes reading itself an ordeal as it requires a great deal of concentration. Furthermore, these points are not cohesive in nature and a single page can convey messages from different chapters. Imagine reading a journal with the first 4 lines addressing one subject, then the following lines addressing another.
Half Knowledge
Summaries lack the depth that is bound to put the reader in a rhetorical phase of mind. These have not been substantiated enough to understand the underlying context or usage.
“Half knowledge is worse than ignorance.” Thomas B. Macaulay
Varying perspectives
Summaries can include just the extracts from a book¹ or a combination of this along with the inferences or additional inputs from the summarizer². It is highly likely that the summarizer found certain parts of the book more significant than the others. But this is the perspective of the summarizer. The same book will be distilled by different writers in different ways, each of them differing in its contents and length. This is because each person perceives things that resonate with them as important and everyone resonates with different content. Why read a biased perspective rather than read the book in its entirety and form your own perspective?
Does not connect
The impact of a book on a reader is determined by the extent that it has influenced them. When the reader really connects with the book, the book speaks for itself. It is then that the reader indulges in its contents. This connect is gradually built over the course of the book and it cannot be developed when the summary just scrapes the surface of the book.
Leads to new exposure
In most self-help books, the point that the author has put forward is the conclusion drawn from years of extensive studies and research. The experiences and the nuances of the research are outlined in the book. These assist the brain-retention abilities because the human mind is designed to retain a lesson better when it is associated with a story or an example. Summaries elude these “non-essential” components. The research carried out might open new dimensions for the readers to consider.
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot
I would like to wrap this up with a rhetorical question: Why would the authors spend substantial amount of man hours in curating a book if they could boil it down to a matter of few pages and publish an article instead? It could definitely be boiled down, but would the essence of the book remain intact?
I will not deny that book summaries come in handy when trying to understand the context of the book before picking it up³. It outlines the salient conclusions that the book intends to deliver in a digestible form. It is also a good practice to make your own summaries or notes while reading a book. Moreover, a few summarizers⁴ even link multiple related books/videos/articles in their summary of one particular book. This would give insights about other related content as well.
“Reading a book is like experiencing an event but reading the summary is knowing what happened at the event.”
Footnotes
[1] I personally do not prefer the extremely concise collection of quotes from a book. But hey! If you do, check out
[2] For a combination of extracts and personal inferences kind of summaries
[3] Check out my previous article that outlines how to select your next book which includes referring to summaries as well
https://woven-string-of-words.medium.com/tell-me-why-self-help-books-may-not-be-helpful-a13b680bc9c9
[4] These summaries have ton loads of references to other similar books within the summary of a given book.
For free summaries : https://fourminutebooks.com/
For paid summaries: https://www.optimize.me/
