March 28th, 2005

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Books
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I Hate Business Books

I haven’t read very many business books, but I’ve loathed everyone that I’ve read. While they do tend to be both pat and padded, it’s not so much the content I object to. I’ve only got so many reading hours in my life–do I really want to waste them on short-lived views of the trivial world of business?

Still, the occasional business book has a genuinely interesting thesis. Few of these are new ideas. In fact, if I’d read more business books, I was thinking of writing an essay about how all of the hip concepts in today’s business books can be found in Shakespeare. Regardless, people talk about this Malcolm Gladwell dude as if he’s the second coming.

I was pleased, then, to read Heather’s entry about getAbstract.

Getabstract.com provides abstracts of the most popular business books. You can prove your mastery of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People over martinis…because you’ll have time for a social life if you don’t have to read the whole book.

I was going to say that I’ve never been much of a Coles Notes reader, but I guess RSS has turned me into a consumer of summaries. Regardless, getAbstract might be the right solution to consuming business books while suffering a minimal amount of pain.

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Andrea
March 28th, 2005
5:26 pm

How does this work from an intellectual property perspective? Are there any legal implications to summarizing another person’s work, without including a review or criticism?

[Reply]

Randy Charles Morin
March 28th, 2005
6:54 pm

Before RSS, I was into books on tape. Listened to all the 7 habits books and many business books. I stopped reading lengthy books back in 1999, when I wrote my first book and realized how much crap I stuffed in there to get the required page count. Since then, I’ve been unable to read books without realizing the author was distracting me with the same stuffed in crap. Get to the point!

[Reply]

Mike Prussian
March 30th, 2005
6:23 am

Not true Darren. Books about business and biographies of business personal can be every bit as interesting as books on say, Sport and Politics. Provided of course that the reader has an interest in the “trivial world” of “business”.

[Reply]

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