‘We May Lose Ability to Think Critically at All’: The Book-Summary Apps Accused of Damaging Authors’ Sales
15th April 2024
Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app.
Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.
Some successful writers, including Amy Liptrot, also fear that apps such as Blinkist, Bookey, getAbstract and the latest, Headway, may be undermining the book trade and misrepresenting content.
A cursory review of several books on Amazon that I am interested in seems to suggest that any book worth reading very quickly has a ‘derivative’ work offering the same essential stuff in a quick and allegedly more digestible form. Often it’s difficult to tell which is the original and which the ‘condensed’ version. In the Good Old Days, lines of business such as Reader’s Digest Condensed Books (to which my parents were addicted, to my benefit) paid authors for the rights to ‘condense’ their books for republication; nowadays, of course, Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Dat (much less morals).