For a year I tried using the service blinkist which provides summary’s of popular non fiction books, with a focus on business and self improvement literature. I thought it would be an effective way to screen books to decide what books I would want to read in full. After a year I decided it wasn’t useful for me.

There are a number of books that I read the blinkist summary and the full text. I found the blinkist summaries moderately helpful. I often found they emphasizing points I didn’t think were particularly important and failed to highlight what I thought were the most important points. I was surprised by this until I thought about my experience with a number of books.

There are several books I have read multiple times. Each time I read these books I had a different experience. Things I once thought were a focus of a chapter now seem more like footnotes, and there are passsage I have no memory of from this first time I read the book, I seem to have completely missed the point the first time through which later seeem to be a major focus of the he book.

This is a reminder that our perspective is shaped by our current life situation and past experiences which has a huge impact on what we perceive, which in turn effects what we learn. It’s not surprising that the summary of a book written by someone who has decades less life experience will callout very different highlights

Update: 20225. On the other hand, I have been generally pleased with the summaries produced by LLM, though sometimes the will provide summary from the table of contents rather than the actual content. These summary tend to feel “generic”. When asked for more details the LLM will “admit” it doesn’t have access to the full content or some other “excuse”.