I read 50 books this year so far, but I wasn't actually thinking
The actual learning happens when you read the book and reflect on your thoughts. The highlighting, the rough notes, jotting down ideas.
Mortimer Adler wrote that the goal of reading is not just to know what an author said, but to understand what they meant and why it matters. But today's reading culture seems designed to give you the 'what' while completely skipping the 'why' and 'so what.' That's exactly what I was doing. I used to think reading lots of book summaries was productive. You feel like you are reading 10s of books in few days compared to reading actual books. But I realized these are just vanity metrics.
It feels good after reading 1–2 summaries. But then I noticed reading more summaries doesn't help unless you take action. What I discovered is summaries won't get the knowledge marinated in you. The actual learning happens when you read the book and reflect on your thoughts. The highlighting, the rough notes, jotting down ideas. Doesn't matter how weird or simple they are.
Using Blinkist, Imprint, or any other book summary app puts you in auto-ride mode where you don't really learn anything. Reading lots of summaries makes you jack of all trades, master of none. Now I get it. There are self-help books that could have been a blog post. But even those books have something summaries miss: the storytelling, the narrative, the way it's written, the choice of words. Summaries are written by some other person, whereas the author is an expert in whatever they wrote about.
And yes, I also understand that sometimes you buy books but don't read them, which is fine. It's more like building an anti-library. But that's different from fooling yourself that you're learning.
The way I see it, the real issue is attention economy. Just like we enjoy watching reels and shorts, summary consumption is like that. So it doesn't help in the long run.
Think about it this way: you could watch the highlights and see the main parts of matches. But reflect on how excited you feel when watching the full match compared to highlights - the anger, excitement, tension.
That's the difference between summaries and books.