As a person who spends a lot of time on the internet and reads a lot of books I am often struck by how stodgy books are and how little they have adapted any new conventions to satisfy an audience with completely altered attentions.
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For fiction, the use of chapters can help. Also, I've noticed myself bouncing more and more off of dry prose like one would find in a lot of classic Sci fi and Fantasy lately in favor of funny and/or "punchy" books with more dialog and "cinematic" presentation.
It's definitely easier to fool yourself into read more when it's a lot of short chapters rather than one long chapter. Mid-chapter dividers (like lines or asterisks) are also useful for that, but it's generally harder to tell where they're going to be (and Kindle doesn't account for them :V)
Oh chapters are a good shout. I’m trying to get back into reading after years of shattering my attention span, picked Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club off the shelf, and really appreciated the short chapters. Really lowered the barrier of intimidation somehow
Yeah, I never noticed it myself until I heard some authors discussing whether or not they use chapters abs why, and/or how long they make them, and then really started noticing how much easier it was on me to read when shortish chapters were there to break up the pacing.
It feels like ticking items on a checklist when you accomplish reading a chapter, and when you can flip ahead and see that the chapter isn't very long it's easier to continue reading through a sloggy part or through your own exhaustion.
But that started well before my attention span was completely destroyed by smart phone usage--I got spoiled by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, and then started getting into modernist SFF and/or urban fantasy writers like Jim Butcher, John Scalzi and Charles Stross.
Pratchett and Adams both really sold me on the use of footnotes to tell jokes, as well, but that's very much a style thing and might not work if you're doing a solemn sort of story.
Obviously you’re making an observation but how do you feel about this fact? I’m a huge curmudgeon when it comes to how the internet shaped our minds so I’m a big fan of this stodginess. I kind of like that it’s not some sort of a dialogue. The writer has an intent and they are usually unwavering
I think that could be because the people with interesting ideas and interpretations are the ones who need their work to make money, so they just print what sells, but that's just my theory.
As someone with ADHD, it's *wild* how much more attention span/tolerance I have for books over any other form of information flow, even books full of stodgy educational subjects.
I wonder if it's an effect of the singular info stream as opposed to the ability to bounce around from stream to stream.
To a certain extent, yes, but I also don't think the fact that some writing techniques are easier to engage with for modern audiences and might be worth considering using even without the shorter attention spans as a motivator. If you're writing to entertain, accessibility is generally preferable
Broaden the scope. Books are a subset of the category "technology designed to record, preserve, and disseminate the written word." That category has exploded with new items and unique approaches over the past two centuries. Books have themselves become audiobooks, webpages, hyperlinked ebooks...
That's why I let my creative writing students write whatever genre they want: because if Pride and Prejudice were written today it would be considered genre romance and stodgy professor types wouldn't consider it literature.
I think making podcasts full of book stories is a good move, since everyone watches podcasts nowadays. It'd be cool to have someone read a book while I'm working to keep my mind happy.
I just started Catch And Kill (extremely late, I know 🤷🏻♀️) and I was struck by Farrow’s liveliness in non-fiction prose. It’s more fun to read than I expected, kinda like a… spy thriller told through a nerdy gay’s journal entries? But I also never read nf books so maybe that’s not so uncommon
I mean this in the best way, but I think you're reading the wrong books. There are SO MANY books out there that are amazing for new audiences. Small presses put out some amazing, incredible books for modern audiences. The big guys don't want to take that risk: they know what's proven to sell well.
Books for young people have changed. Tons of great graphic novels (both fiction and nonfiction). Nonfiction books are popping! Lots of colour and graphics. There are books worth checking but you may have to seek them out.
Pictographs, a lot more pictures, pages have 1/4 or 1/3 text vs. a wall of small print text, vocab or important concepts are highlighted in different colors (not just bold) to match similar concepts and vocab.
Gawd! I can’t believe they expect people to READ in an Advanced Placement class! The audacity! Expecting people to read information and learn from it in school! Awful!
I definitely like the trend. The only issue I have with some of them (👀 at you Pearson) is that some of the pictographs seem to be designed by Tiktok influencers instead of scientists. Like no... you don't need a drop shadow on sequence of pie charts when you just needed a scatter plot.
I used to read a load, I don’t anymore unless I’m on holiday (which I never am anymore). Playing games is just much more fun to do in my free time. I don’t know if this is anything that can be fixed by new conventions sadly, though I wish it could be. I miss reading.
Former librarian here. This may be anecdotal, but I have seen some changes - short books that would have been considered novellas ten years ago, published and promoted as books. Larger fonts. Conversations that occur over texts and not in person.
Given the amount it costs the taxpayers & families in textbooks worldwide, why don't they form a co-op buy Brilliant, open source it to make it freely adaptable & deployable on tablets & phones locally sans network AND fund it annually for content creators to expand it to cover full curriculums.
Clearly this means every book should come with a drawing of a single frame of Subway Surfers gameplay at the edge that you flip through like some dystopian Flip-O-Rama
Nah it's good, it's good that there's at least some form of art that actually requires the audience to pay attention. How is one ever supposed to develop a real ability to pay attention if nothing ever requires one to do so?
One of the things I like about many books I read is that in an era of short attention spans, they pull you in for long periods. But also if you want books that are shorter and punchier, those currently exist in vast quantity
I only read non-fiction (and a lot of it) but the same argument and question applies. Very few of the books are stodgy. Most of them are really good; interesting and well written.
I literally scrolled past and then immediately back up here, prepared to fight all the gods and saw the rest of the thread clarified everything I was prepared to argue. 10/10, thank you.
I once asked my academic publisher to let me include QR codes to websites that illustrated my points or showed video clips of things I discussed. We all had a good laugh.
I've mostly switched to audiobooks to "read" more, but it's still tough with nonfiction. Professional narrators of nonfiction always adopt the most monotone voice imaginable. Even bumping it up to 2.5x speed is often not enough to prevent me from spacing out.
I wanted to make some argument about how maybe catering to our poor attention spans only makes the attention issue worse, but then I read a response about school books and remembered how impossible it was for me to read those huge blocks of text I didn't care about.
So mixed feelings, I guess.
I thought you just meant the medium of books in general. Like adding braille with special firm paper to each chapter head. or having the book pages intentionally not lined up so it seems more eye catching
There might be a bit of that. "I want to enlighten myself on this topic, so I must read this dry book." Then I feel like a philistine if a book winds up being too dense for me to get through.
As a book lover who doesn't read anymore because attention, I'm curious what you mean by innovation here. I can't think of examples of innovative writing, but then it's not something I've looked for, either.
I guess fiction authors are allowed to play. Non-fiction authors are often beholden to maintaining airs of professionalism, and upholding previously established standards of how info is 'meant' to be communicated. It's probably about satisfying peers rather than the public.
I bought a book about prion disease that should have been enthralling and yet 🫠 it was educational but an absolute slog and jump around entirely too much for how short it was
I’m reading Minimalista by Shira Gill right now and I’m struck by how well edited and formatted it is (a mixture of text, bullet points, and callout boxes.) It’s easy to read some parts in detail and skim over other parts.
I think some of this is because of how little academic writing evolves over time. It’s very strict and dry. Filling a word count instead of making sure your words have actual content in them.
I think this depends on the topics and your level of interest in them. It's been a while since I left uni, but the textbooks I was most thankful for were the ones that didn't try to make the information too digestible.
It was similar when I learned music in school. The introductory textbooks used pictures and colourful descriptions to explain basic theory (e.g. CGP textbooks from around 2005), but more "academic" books were more instructive.
I want reading to function like TV shows: short stories within an overarching plot, easy to read but also easy to binge. It’s something I’m contemplating how to do with my writing. Serialized fiction is out there, but it’s not gaining much of a foothold at the moment :(
Not entirely kidding with this: Audio books where you can interrupt the book with questions, discuss the content, and get references to supporting materials.
I feel that Jason Schreier's writting avoid that quite neetly. He tends to setup/payoffs his documentary books, every chapter ends in a small appetizer as to what the next chapter is about. And I'm sure I've missed a lot of other techniques
The DK Eyewitness boos are incredibly fun to peruse, as a kid I ate them up and found one in a used book shop recently and was still enamored. They remind me of how Guinness World Record books are formatted
I've noticed that I am very wasteful with text space, and use more paragraphs than necessary, likely because of how Reddit works, and how I spent much of my youth there.
What's UP reader, your old pal narrator here! Cannonboom Inducorp invited me and six of my friends to their abandoned weapons test range for a game of WHODUNNIT! Can we solve the mystery before the BIG BOOM? (The Zebra didn't do it LOL) *air horn noises*
I've had a few conversations over the last decade or so about whether serialised fiction is likely to become increasingly prevalent. It would be funny to go full J. G. Ballard and write fiction in the format of The Atrocity Exhibition en masse.
I’m Gen Z (27) and even I could type before I could write. I watched videos on Newgrounds and Youtube before I could read. I learned about opinions regarding 9/11 before I could sufficently make my own. It’s a reality that books are falling out of favor, I can only imagine for Gen A.
Honestly feel like most of that stuff has offloaded onto podcasts. I read a book from a pastor about relationships, and it was basically just his podcast series on relationships transcribed to a book.
On the flip side, a lot of online writing is so fluffy as to annoy me to death with its tendency to cover for lack of substance with a flurry of words.
That's an interesting point. One thing I'll say about publishing in Japan is that they did a much better job on this front. There still a market for stodgy books. But there's lots of digestible large pamphlet sized books on all kinds of subjects. Often with cool illustrations.
As an oldie whose attention span has shortened along with the rest of the world, I love reading faster-paced narratives now. I have to retrain my brain in order to enjoy classic literature but it is a good exercise to switch up.
formatting traditionalism aside, i think there's also just more pressure to cut costs.
i've bought a relatively cheap book recently, but its margins were about a centimeter wide and it has basically zero spacing in order to cram as much text as possible.
idk, I read books in part to remind myself that I still have an attention span after all. It doesn't get much use sure, but it's still there, and that's a comfort
For education, I really thought the Head First books were onto something with their attempts to hack the attention span thing and play into the brain's desire for occasional exciting shit. It helped me with java quite a bit.
Currently reading a novel with chapters ranging in size from five pages to half a page, so I’m not totally convinced.
Half a page! Maybe you wouldn’t even need to scroll one time!
There were some Jo Clayton science-fiction books, I think the Skeen's Leap books, where the chapter titles were part of the book and kind of fourth-wallish. One chapter title went on for pages (as a title: bold, 36 point) to explain a point of alien reproduction, as I recall.
as a person who spends a lot of time on the internet and reads a lot of books i thank the lord books are the way they are to give me a reprieve from the chaos and fast pace of the internet.
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I wonder if it's an effect of the singular info stream as opposed to the ability to bounce around from stream to stream.
(I find myself on a mobius strip of books... rereading the same stuff... mainly to put my mind to sleep, so I can sleep. Hopeless)
just have a little window of Subway runner open in the corner of the page
(Im joking but I actually wonder would that help....)
https://www.owlflyllc.com/product-page/the-cicadas-of-north-america-preorder
no opinion on non-food non-fiction
So mixed feelings, I guess.
https://bsky.app/profile/jimorian.bsky.social/post/3l7gwzhkw4u2t
This has become kind of problematic at work😅
A little (So that just happened) during critical moments would make reading about the Roman Empire certainly interesting.
i've bought a relatively cheap book recently, but its margins were about a centimeter wide and it has basically zero spacing in order to cram as much text as possible.
it's an absolute torture to read.
Half a page! Maybe you wouldn’t even need to scroll one time!
very interesting to think about how the net and short form content will come around to influence old school mediums