Marc Schultz

Get Hooked on (Condensed) Books
April 3, 2007

You ever wish you could just inject books directly into your brain? (Or better yet -- into someone else's? I could tell you a boring story about a certain friend who could use about 30cc's of James Rapson's Anxious to Please ... but I digress.)

Seriously, though: in today's get-it-done-last-week world, who has time to get through an entire book?

Though intraveneous reading is still a few years off -- at least according to estimates coming out of publisher R&D -- Ron Hogan at Galleycat reports on a promising trend:

Moka mBooks [will] send "the essential ideas from books in concise 160-character or less messages optimized for SMS messaging" to your cellphone, PDA, or email. ... launch inventory include[s] many of the world's religious classics ... as well as cornerstone philosophical texts. [my emphasis]

Yep, it's a brave new world -- but one foreseen by John Crace of the Guardian, a guy these Moka folks would be smart to put on retainer. He's been "optimizing" books for years in his column The Digested Read. He's even got a book collecting the highlights, just out in the U.S. this past summer.

What is a Digested Read, exactly? Essentially, Crace can hyper-condense any given book -- typically catching not just plot and characters but style, tone, authorial quirks, and a healthy bit of criticism -- in no more than 1000 words. Then he condenses it again(!) in a single sentence: "The digested read, digested." And it's funny. (Of the new Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach: "One messy outburst and it's all over.")

So check out Crace's book, his digests will catch you up on years of reading in no time. Careful, though -- they're addictive.

Posted by Marc Schultz on April 3, 2007 | Comments (0)