August 7th, 2021 | Books vs YouTube

Yesterday I was trying to explain to my younger brother why I read books.

"You are fucking old. You know there is YouTube, Documentaries and Wikipedia, right?"

I paused for a second.

I felt pretentious. Am I thinking books are worth it because they are harder to complete than a video or a one page summary?

I thought about it for a second and responded.

"Sometimes books are stretched over 300 pages when they only cover a couple of ideas. Ideas that you could find and grasp through YouTube or Wikipedia in 15 minutes. Those books obviously suck.

But other times, they go into such depths that you would never reach with online content. A YouTube video would have to be 10 hours long to go there and it would be the most boring thing ever.

Producers on these online platforms optimize for engagement and for quantity of videos. They have to push out content regularly and have to sacrifice quality and depth in the process.

So do I. Compare my long form blog posts to my tweets."

And the most important thing is incentives.

People creating content online are trying to gain something from you. There is a very evident goal they have, other than educating you.

Visit their website. Buy their course. Sign up for the product their are affiliated with.

So their content is titled and tailored towards that goal.

Books are a little different. They are purer, since the author has very little to gain from you after you have bought the book.

Authors are mostly driven by ego, not money.

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