(2020-11-10) Burja Why Im Writing A Book

Samo Burja: Why I'm Writing A Book. I am writing a book on great founder theory.

But why even write a book? It’s 2020. Does anyone read them?

The books worth reading for how they change your thinking—the kinds of books Mortimer Adler would recommend reading three times to truly grasp, where each sentence carries information and each sentence is intended by the author to be understood—will do just fine. It is just the case that the list of such books numbers in the hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands.

Books as something for your spare time, as entertainment, are continuing their long retreat

Should we just all blog? Or even just tweet?

Discourse of course isn’t everything. You might use a book as one of several tools to create a living intellectual tradition that remains niche but greatly influences the course of history. However, discourse is the only form of intellectual production that fits the contours of industrial society. It can be marketed and scaled, after all.

There remains a strong role for popular intellectual books that focus on the largest scale. You can’t deliver a whole new worldview in one tweet, article, or lecture. Yet such worldviews affect popular writing on everything from social issues to foreign policy. Yuval Noah Harari’s 2015 Sapiens became a bestseller communicating part of the late 20th century academic consensus on human history. Two decades earlier, Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel did even more, delivering new models of human history beyond such consensus.