What an interesting idea; I've certainly noticed with the non-fiction books I've been reading lately I'm skipping over pretty large sections of the anecdotal stuff. Almost none of the ideas that these books are putting forward are particularly complicated--interesting, yes, but not so difficult to wrap your head around that you need 10 anecdotes to explain each concept, or whatever. I don't particularly mind reading non-fiction books this way, so long as the books are written in a way that you don't have to go searching for the concepts amidst the anecdotes. But my concern is that this kind of reading is making me a worse fiction reader; for any fiction that's actually worth reading you really shouldn't be skimming it just to find the plot points, and I'm finding that's happening to me.
Curious how this compares to just listening to a podcast review of a book.
reviews tend to be more “this is good” or “this is bad” or responding to arguments. blinkist is more of a straight-up summary.
you can find ebook summaries of popular books in your library too, or in amazon, but again there’s a hunting and pecking and vetting of summarizers which i don’t have time for.
The copyright lawyer finds this absolutely fascinating. My first question when I saw your recommendation: but what about the copyright; is Blinklist only publishing "blinks" for the books for which it gets permission from (pays a royalty to) the authors? I'd think a lot of authors would really not like what Blinklist is doing. But, per below, Blinklist isn't making any direct payments to or getting any permissions from the authors.
What about copyrights? Are you stealing from authors?
Avatar Stefanie
17 days ago Updated
Our books-in-blinks distill the main ideas and most important concepts from nonfiction books, but they are new, original works of their own, written in our Blinkist style, voice, and format. We work with publishing partners to select the most compelling ideas to blink, introducing customers to new books and authors they might otherwise miss.
Our blinks are concise and compelling, but necessarily limited by their format. Think of them as a robust movie trailer for books. Full length books offer more in-depth discussion, rich examples, references, and explanations that blinks can’t fit. Which is why we offer an easy way for customers to find, buy and listen to the full audiobook on Blinkist.
We hope that by giving people an easy way to discover new knowledge, Blinkist will bring authors more readers and get more great books noticed and read - increasing authors’ income along the way. We believe that ideas are important and delightful, and can make your mind healthier and happier, too. Just as a taste of a new topic might get you curious about a whole new area of study, and that one great sentence can offer you new perspectives, enticing you to read more, not less.
This strikes me as taking to the extreme the concept that copyright doesn't protect ideas, only the expression of those ideas (and of course the authors of these kinds of books can't get utility or method or design patents on the ideas in their books). Fascinating stuff. An author could have Xmillion people read the summary of her book via Blinklist, which Blinklist is profiting from, without the author getting a dime short of the unlikely situation where a reader decides to buy the full book having already consumed the substance of the book via Blinklist. I mean, I just listened to the blink of "Deficit Myth" by Kelton, and having gotten the substance of her Magical (sorry, Modern) Monetary Theory proposition, there's no way in hell I'd now want to go read her explain MMT in 336 pages. Interesting stuff. Just wondering if (or when) Amazon is going to figure out a way to exploit this; because with the popularity of podcasts I'd think the Blinklist format is going to end up being WIDELY popular. Well, at least until it results in no one going through the trouble of writing nonfiction books anymore. OR, in my perfect world, authors are forced to get really, really good at expressing their ideas in these sorts of distilled-down formats, such that there could be no way a Blinklist could do a "summary" of those ideas without committing copyright infringement. Really interesting stuff.
Actually, what I'd advise publishers to do is to prepare their own Blinklist style summary to include with the book itself, which would give them a MUCH stronger case when they sue Blinklist for infringement when Blinklist creates its own summary.
I mean, as if the publishing and book selling industry hasn't been beaten up enough.
