Blinkist promises shortcuts to buzzy books, but is 15 minutes enough?
Imust declare fromthe outset that when it comes to Blinkist, Iwas a skeptic.
Blinkist, for the uninitiated, is an appbased service that promises to digest the “key insights from 4,500+ best-selling nonfiction books and popular podcasts into powerful explainers you can read or listen to in 15 minutes.”
Iwas a skeptic because the point of reading a book is to actually read it, not just to have read it. Even with nonfiction that is primarily informative, part of the experience is seeing howfacts and argument are joined together to form the whole.
Blinkist digests longer texts into a series of “blinks,” 10 (more or less) mini-chapters lasting one minute to to 90 seconds each that summarize one main idea. Aggregated, blinks do indeed distill full books to a 15minute single shot; its text versions are readable inwell under 15 minutes.
As I paged through the blinks on offer, I sawa number of books that I’d been curious about but also knew I’d never have time to read— books such as “The End of Poverty” by Jeffrey Sachs and “One Billion Americans” byMatthew Yglesias.
As someone concerned about population and the environment, a billion Americans sounds like a not-great idea to me, so I was curious about what Yglesias is up to. According to the blinks, he’s primarily making an economic argument that lots of people are capable of lots of productivity, and that ifwe increase support for people through family-friendly policies or improved transportation infrastructure, we can achieve broader prosperity, even if we’re a billion people strong.
It’s an interesting and intriguing notion. The audio blinks are a bit straight and dry in their delivery, but they’re also clear and easy to grasp. They’re not constructed for narrative pleasure like a podcast or full audiobook, but at 15 minutes or less, by the time you’ve had enough, they’re over.
So far so good, but in listening to the blinks, the old teacher of writing flared inside of me. At each pronouncement, such as “Housing scarcity is the result of politics, not a lack of space,” Iwould think, sounds good, but ….
The “but” was a desire to knowthe underlying evidence to see fromwhere that conclusion had come. By design, the blinks squeeze all of thatmaterial out of the book sowe are left with only the conclusion, but conclusions by themselves, particularly when they are stated with a patina of authority, are dangerous.
Thiswasmy response to a book whose theses I feel generallywell-disposed toward. Yglesias seems to be making a technocratic argument around greater sharing of our collectivewealth to increase overall prosperity.
Without that evidence, though, it’s impossible to judge the soundness of those conclusions. We need to think more deliberatively for ourselves and spend less time digesting ideas for others. Iwant to experience the full marshaling of the argument.
Now, there are books that may lose less when converted to blinks, the kinds of books that don’t need to be books, as they’re primarily collections of bullet points.
Similar to CliffsNotes, we should see things such as Blinkist as an aid, not a substitute. It did makeme somewhat more interested in reading “One Billion Americans,” so there is that benefit. However, I would notwant to pretend that having listened to the Blinkist digest that I have read and understood the book itself.
It turns out there is no substitute for the whole thing.