Ask HN: What books have been worth your time?(ycombinator.com) Curious to know which books you've read that genuinely felt worth the time and attention you gave them. Can be fiction, non-fiction, self-help, technical, philosophical, or anything else.
What Makes Technology Good?(thomaslemstrom.substack.com) I like the simple word ‘skill’. A skill is not just a trick—it’s what enables survival and success. Many things are skills. Reading is not just words—it’s a way to unlock the world. Selling is not just a hustle—it can be the power over your fate.
Becoming Literate Again(jordankoschei.com) It’s almost impossible to talk about attention spans, the modern media environment, and “kids these days” without sounding like a self-righteous prig who’s read too much Marshall McLuhan. So let me start by saying that I’m writing this for myself, about myself, with no judgment towards myself or others.
3 points by jordankoschei 93 days ago | 1 comments
Good readers have distinct brain anatomy, research reveals(psypost.org) The number of people who read for fun appears to be steadily dropping. Fifty percent of UK adults say they don’t read regularly (up from 42% in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16-24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.
Ask HN: How are you reading (nonfiction) books/pdfs in 2025?(ycombinator.com) Everytime I start reading a book, I feel like uploading it in NotebookLM/ChatGPT to get QA; but these don't let me read in their app, and its not easy to get digital copies of books. I also want to ask questions adjacent to what I'm reading easily; I wonder if there are great apps/hacks people have for this.
416 points by simplegeek 115 days ago | 175 comments
Readest: An immersive eBook reader for deep reading(github.com/readest) Readest is an open-source ebook reader designed for immersive and deep reading experiences. Built as a modern rewrite of Foliate, it leverages Next.js 15 and Tauri v2 to offer a seamless cross-platform experience on macOS, Windows, Linux and Web, with support for mobile platforms coming soon.
134 points by hubraumhugo 122 days ago | 129 comments
Why Books Donʼt Work(andymatuschak.org) Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book. Paper or pixels—it hardly matters. Words in lines on pages in chapters. And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken.
In praise of the hundred page idea(tracydurnell.com) I prefer a lightweight nonfiction book to a detailed tome. I’m a dilettante of many interests, so my attention for any given topic is more likely to sustain 100 pages than 600. The sweet spot is longer than a longread internet article, but that doesn’t demand a months-long commitment: a 2-3 hour text.
165 points by surprisetalk 128 days ago | 62 comments
The One Hundred Pages Strategy(thelampmagazine.com) Almost nothing I have written in the last few years has given rise to more correspondence than a throwaway column about reading, in which I alluded to what I call the “hundred pages strategy.”
People who are good at reading have different brains: study(theconversation.com) The number of people who read for fun appears to be steadily dropping. Fifty percent of UK adults say they don’t read regularly (up from 42% in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16-24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.
158 points by pseudolus 134 days ago | 162 comments
The One Hundred Pages Strategy(thelampmagazine.com) Almost nothing I have written in the last few years has given rise to more correspondence than a throwaway column about reading, in which I alluded to what I call the “hundred pages strategy.”
117 points by christudor 148 days ago | 151 comments
In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse(lithub.com) When the witty and wry English fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ in 1995, only 39% of Americans had access to a home computer. According to the Pew Research Center, the number who were connected to the internet was a paltry 14%. At the dawn of the internet age, when optimistic bromides about the information superhighway to the 21st century were replete in politics and culture, the author of the “Discworld” series was less sanguine.