I use the Firefox browser often and I like the New Page feature of Pocket. I have saved quite a few articles to Pocket and they have influenced my thinking and broadened my knowledge.
The other day, I saw an item in their suggested readings for me about a service called Blinkist. Turns out to be a German service that creates summaries of popular books. The snippet said that the group wanted to change the way we read but once I found they offered digests of important and popular books, I was less interested. I have noticed that quite a few non-fiction books I look up in Amazon are accompanied by summaries of the main ideas in the book. The summaries are quite a bit cheaper than the book itself and are based on the idea that a person can understand more of the world if fast summaries are read instead of those long books. I went to the book section of the Amazon web site today and searched for "summary". I was looking for the names of publishers who offer summaries of books. I must have found 5 or 6 different summary publishers.
The whole business of summaries reminds me of Reader's Digest and the article written by E.B. White "Irtnog" (1935). His article tells a ficticious story about digests and digests of disgests in an attempt to allow readers to keep up with the ever increasing amount to be read each day. Things got to the point that there was a word of the day that "summarized" all the writings of that day. For instance, the word of one day was "irtnog". Just knowing the word of the day, one could feel caught up with everything that was written that day. [His writing by that name is available on the web if you want to look it up.]
I am sorry to break the news but there are always limits. We are not going to be able to taste all the good dishes, see all the exciting shows, read all the good books nor visit all the great places. Yes, the truth is that we will both die without having experienced some truly wonderful things. Shall we weep together now?
