Book summaries don't quite deliver the experience of reading a book. Books contain crucial background and history that help you build a framework for understanding the picture the author is painting.

The little details matter. Each contradiction needs resolving and each inferential gap needs bridging, and sometimes you need a full book to help with that.

However, books can also contain a lot of unwanted experience, like fluff, irrelevant stories, long preambles, etc. For the right people, this forms part of a desirable experience. But not everyone who picks up the book is the target audience. A well-written summary would help the reader decide whether they are.

Further, book summaries can be enjoyable experiences themselves, as evidenced by the many book summarizing services and YouTube content creators who make video summaries.

Book Summaries Can Be a Form of Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is a method of learning in which you review discrete concepts at increasing time intervals. Over time, this leads to memorization.

Using a spaced repetition system is fun because each correct answer produces a dopamine hit comparable to increasing your score in a video game or stacking cash, whether in Monopoly or real life.

Book summaries targeted towards your specific interests and goals can bring similar rewards.

Even if you don't use a spaced repetition app, hearing something you've heard before strengthens your memory of that concept.

Book Summaries Can Help You Decide Which Books to Devour

Let's say you're building your first SaaS company. You want to learn the basics of business development, heard that Bill Gates reads for an hour each night, and decide to add a few books to your reading list.

Unfortunately, Amazon returns over 10,000 results under the Business Development & Entrepreneurship > Starting a Business category. Besides reading book descriptions and reviews, you can decide whether you want to invest hours into a book by reading well-crafted book summaries that convey some of the practical information.

Since a summary writer needs to convey the key points concisely, they leave out jargon and complicated examples. This helps you get a feel for the outlines of a field without being overwhelmed by details.

Once you have a sense of the big picture, you'll notice interesting problems that spark your curiosity. At that point, you can delve deeply by reading entire books on those areas.

How to Learn from Nonfiction Book Summaries

Learning is fun but dangerous. Your brain treats information much like it does money and food, hence the addictiveness of scrolling through social media and reading random blog posts. You risk frittering your time away if you don't filter information for the concepts that move you forward.

Further, hearing new and insightful ideas interleaved with concepts you're familiar with, but expressed in different contexts, produces variability that keeps you hooked.

The alternating of familiar and unfamiliar—in Nir Eyal's words, the "exciting juxtaposition of relevant and irrelevant, tantalizing and plain, beautiful and common"—amplifies the reward-seeking effect [1], which drives you to continue reading.

To keep from falling too far down a rabbit hole while reading lengthy book summaries, follow these steps:

• As you read, extract—highlight, note down, annotate, etc.—only the information that would help you reach your goals. These include actionable advice and practical instructions.
• Also save the ideas you find counterintuitive, that you disagree with, or that you find interesting. These are easy to remember, so they'll help you build a strong framework for the topic you're studying.
• Every few minutes, reflect on what you just read and the snippets you saved. Would it help you grow, scale, or otherwise improve your business income? If not, move on to something else.

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[1] Eyal, Nir. Hooked (p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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