Calculating Book Density

Written by Colin Y.J. Chung
on 

We’ve all heard of terms like “light reading” or a “heavy book”. And most people have a good idea of what that means. It’s how “dense” a book is.

For nonfiction, I would argue it’s how many new ideas per page are presented in a book. If there’s a lot of “fluff”, (like stories, anecdotes and diagrams we could skim past)… all supporting one idea, that’s on the lighter side of reading. On the other hand, if we’re reading say… a textbook, and every sentence is a new fact that builds on the last one… (and you would get lost if you started skimming)… that’s heavy.

I decided to take this a little further with a scale from 1 to 5. 1 being light and 5 being heavy.

I did this for two reasons. One, as you know, there are a lot of self-help and business books out there that “could’ve-been-a-blog-post” (or even a thread). Those are books where a summary would help you avoid investing hours of reading just for a few good, useful ideas. But there are also nonfiction books out there that are dense-as-fuck. And every page is worth its metaphorical “weight in gold”. In some cases, you can’t even summarize all the good ideas crammed into these books.

Here’s how I would weight book density:

Weighing Book Density

Books with 5.0 Density

Let’s start with the heaviest books possible. Those I would rank a 5. These are books that are literally impossible to summarize. They aren’t even “books” per se. They are instruction manuals, cookbooks, rulebooks, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.

These are reference books where every line is important. For example, you can’t summarize a cake recipe. If you skip an ingredient or a step, you will end up baking something that’s “not a cake”. You can say the same of the rules of chess. You’re not playing chess if you don’t follow the rules.

So with that said, these aren’t so much books as reference materials. I bring it up just to give us a “signpost” to talk about the other rankings below. So let’s move on…

Books in the 4.0 - 4.9 Scale

These books are what we can call “heavy books”. Books like…

Textbooks usually cover multiple topics in one subject area. While you can summarize the core themes of these books… it would be really difficult to include everything.

A self-help book that falls into this category is Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power (1998). Each of the “laws” is a topic with several historical examples. It’s a heavy book. You may not even want to read it from cover-to-cover.

A philosophy book is a core premise supported by a logical chain of sub-arguments. This can be said the same of books on politics, economics and sociology.

With these books, you can summarize the core premise in a paragraph and list out its major arguments. But you would need to strip out all the research, anecdotes, charts, tables, and color of the book.

Finally there are histories and biographies. These are detailed records of events. You can summarize the overarching themes of the story, but like every real life story, there are a lot of side characters, subplots, and weird detours. It’s like a kaleidoscope. What’s more – it’s often open to interpretation. Most historical figures are who they are because they led controversial lives.

Books in the 3.0 to 3.9 Scale

When it comes to self-help, business, and relationship books, most of them fall inside this ranking. I mean, after all, they want to be accessible to as many people as possible.

So with that said, I find that most 3.0 - 3.9 books usually have ONE strong core idea backed up by 7-12 good arguments. They’re often filled with stories, anecdotes and fun, interesting research studies. They’re easy to digest. Most bestselling books land here.

However, at the same time, most of these books can be summarized down to their essential 10%. That’s not to say they’re not worth reading. But if you had a good solid summary, you probably wouldn’t re-read the book and review your notes instead.

Books in the 2.0-2.9 Scale

These are the “could’ve-been-a-blog-post” books. They’re books with one good simple idea or concept, zero sub-arguments, and a lot of fluff: stories and anecdotes. In some cases, they “could’ve-been-a-listicle”. Like seven steps to a happy marriage. Or five keys to building a business. These ones are often oversimplified arguments and you might feel good about reading it… but you don’t remember much of it later. A lot of these books can be read in one sitting even.

Books in the 1.0-1.9 Scale

These are often one key lesson wrapped in a “fable”. Sometimes, they’re super deep and meaningful like Mitch Albom’s The Last Lecture (2008). Sometimes, they’re a book that went viral but doesn’t offer a lot of useful teaching like Who Moved My Cheese?(1998) (2-word summary: change happens) or The One Minute Manager (1982) (2-word summary: Don’t micromanage).

Those last two examples are the equivalent of a viral thread, YouTube video, or LinkedIn carousel of today. Super-simple concept that gets reposted by everyone, but back in those days, you’d sell thousands of copies to a corporation who would then force their employees to read it.

Low density books doesn’t necessarily mean a book is “bad” though. Some business fable books have very important lessons. (Any of Patrick Lencioni’s books are great, IMO). They’re wrapped in an emotional story to really drive home the simple lesson for the reader.

Further Thoughts on Book Density

I’m not saying one is better than the other. One of my favorite threads of all time was written by Venkatash Rao. It’s called ”How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin”.

His premise is simple: You need to diversify your content diet. You can’t only read smart, heavy books like classics, history and literature. You also have to read the news and well-written articles and yes, even shitposts on social media. Each one serves a purpose.

Heavy books gives you wisdom, but without news (modern context and situations),  it’s useless. If you look at the one-page slide deck below, you’re in the “Empirically Ungrounded Bullshit” territory. These people tend to be elitist blowhards who have a lot of theory, but zero street smarts to apply their grandiose ideas.

Alternately, if all you do is doom scroll and consume news, you end up in the bottom half where you “can’t see the forest for the trees”. Everything is chaotic, all politicians lie, it’s all fake news. That’s not healthy either. Because now you’re dismissing what’s happening in the real world and living in an echo chamber.

You need both heavy and low density information.

information loop

Put another way – Social media, newsletters, etc. gives us DATA on what’s going on in the world right now. Who are the players? What moves are they making? What are they reacting to? Long-form writing and books gives us TOOLS to make sense of aforementioned “data”. Put them together and you have CONTEXT in which you can place bets on life.

The key is balance. You shouldn’t be enraged by social media. You should be able to use it as a datapoint… informed by your contextual analysis. (Because you read books and live in the real world).