In most cases, the primary driver for reading non-fiction books is a desire to learn (as opposed to, say, a need for entertainment).
The problem with non-fiction publishing
At Sivv, we love books. There is very little that we would rather do than spend a day immersed within a great book, learning about how the world works and how we can better function within it. Nevertheless, we have come to believe that non-fiction books are hugely inefficient channels for information consumption. The problem, as we see it, is as follows:
Minimum length requirements and historical precedent mean that many books pad-out a core argument with unnecessary information.
As a result, useful information is unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming to access. This, in turn, makes it harder to understand and retain.
Moreover, different books often cover many of the same ideas while it can be difficult to determine where novel ideas fit within the wider topic.
Once consumed, even useful information is easily forgotten. Without making and reviewing notes, many people fail to apply the ideas they encounter.
Publishing lead-times mean that many books do not cover up-to-date research, tools or trends, while content can quickly become stale or even wrong.
Think about it – if 100,000 people read a book and take, on average, ten hours to do so, that represents one million hours of invested effort. If the outcome of this is that some of those people (many will not finish) come away with a handful of useful ideas, many of which are quickly forgotten and never applied, that surely represents a massive inefficiency?
Perhaps even more frustratingly, because of the barriers to information access that the standard book format establishes, many useful and possibly even life-changing ideas go entirely undiscovered by the majority of people. The problem is exacerbated by the challenges of modern life, which burdens many of us with ever-busier schedules and information overload.
Many of the above issues apply to articles, podcasts, blog posts and research. Services providing book summaries are only a partial solution – they are useful if you want to know the ideas that a book covers but suffer from many of the same inefficiencies if you are trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of a topic.
We founded Sivv to address these issues. We make useful ideas more accessible to help you achieve your goals more quickly and with less overwhelm. Our initial focus is on topics that are central to the personal and professional endeavours of most people and yet are largely untouched by formal education or training. Such life skills include productivity, communication, decision-making, career development, learning and wellbeing.