WHY READING APPS ARE A BEAUTIFUL WASTE OF TIME

My good friend, the continuously award-winning PR genius James Herring, sent me a link to a reading app that will make me as smart as Elon Musk.?Like all reading apps claiming to give you the insights of a billionaire without the effort of becoming an actual billionaire, this latest one stressed its time saving benefits.?

Having looked at all of them; from?Blinkist?to?Mentorist?to?Uptime?to?Headway?over the last ten years, here’s what I know: At best, reading apps are a positive supplement to learning, like vitamins to a healthy diet of good food and exercise. BUT they don’t save you time or make you smarter.

The problem with reading apps is they underestimate humankind’s most powerful binding of sound, symbol and print - the technology of the book. It can be used at speed or slowly – individually or in a group of billions of people. It is not improved or enhanced by other technologies. In this sense?it is a prime technology, divisible only by itself.

This is the paradox of time saving apps - How time-poor people often waste more time using time-saving technology than?if they just did the time-consuming task in hand?better.?

Put another way, in terms of nutrition and pleasure, just as steak and chips is not improved by blending and sucking it through a straw, a summarised book cannot produce the same effect or experience as consuming the content of the book itself. You can of course eat / read at speed, but more of that later. I don’t have time to explain that here.

That said, summaries and synopses are incredibly useful if you are a teenager cramming for an exam, or you want to pretend that you know something in a meeting or an interview. But summaries are available for free everywhere (see point two below). Leaders don’t need to be spoon-fed knowledge, do they? If you really want to pay for a beautiful interface on a monthly basis, and you don't mind if your money goes to a tech firm rather than an author, then reading apps might be for you, but again, they won't save you time or make you smarter.

Lists on the other hand are very time-efficient and smart. I love a list. Especially a list of three, the scientifically proven number of points that is most easy to remember. So, here’s a list of?Three Reasons Why Reading Apps Are a Waste of Time:

1.?????You’ll forget what you read. If you repeatedly consume new knowledge in the same format (however beautiful) your brain will soon file it under “unimportant.”

2.?????Search is faster and better?– Publishers go to great lengths to make the key points of every book ever printed readily available to anyone with a keyboard and a screen.

3.?????Books are people in print. Show them some respect. The author(s) spend years distilling their original, memorable insights into a book. Don’t waste?their?time.