Condensed, or just dense? The apps that turn books into 15-minute reads

Is this reading or “reading”? An app called Joosr, which aims to help users read a book in 20 minutes, has just been launched in the UK. Initially, this horrified me. I ranted that we had lost our ability to concentrate, that authors’ words are sacred. But then I looked at what the app was actually doing and realised it could be a good idea.

The app has more than 100 nonfiction books in a radically condensed format available on a subscription. Think self-help bestsellers like Hal Elrod’s The Miracle Morning and dense science texts like A Brief History of Time (sorry Dr Hawking, I did try). With the first type of book, readers can pick out useful tips without wading through pages of case studies; with the latter, a briefer version might be the only way to get information to stick.

I wanted to see if an even briefer A Brief History of Time would help me to finally understand the underpinnings of the universe. As I’m an Android user and Joosr is iOS-only, I gave its rival Blinkist (more than 1,000 books in 15-minute reads for around 50 quid a year) a go.

Yes, it was well and truly simpler: it still includes the Big Bang and black holes, but there’s no mention of string theory, or the philosophical background to scientific discoveries, which I dimly remember from my attempt to read the original. But it packed a lot of physics into 14 “blinks” – phone-screen-sized summaries. And it wasn’t dumbed down; I could have done with even simpler explanations, preferably some diagrams. But I did learn that particles act like waves and that a twin who lived on a mountain would age more quickly than one who lived at sea level, which is more than I knew when I woke up. Who knows, maybe I will try the full-length book again one day.

Summarising novels in this way probably wouldn’t work, because they’re as much about voice as ideas, but there have been attempts to make fiction more easily absorbed. Since 1950, Reader’s Digest has published condensed editions of popular books, last year signing a deal to make them available as ebooks and paperbacks, as well as their standard hardbacks. This month, prolific bestseller James Patterson launched BookShots, a series of 150-page romances and thrillers. The first two novellas sold a combined 30,000 copies in the first week. “But is it reading?” panicked The Paris Review, “... is this form of reading the same thing as sustained reading? Does one lead to the other?”

It’s easy for literary journalists to forget that for many people, the choice isn’t between reading Gillian Flynn and Gustave Flaubert, but between reading and not. Life is hard, Orange is the New Black is back on Netflix, and according to Joosr’s research, six out of 10 of us complain about not reading as much as we’d like. With libraries closing and zero-hours contracts proliferating, £1.50 for a quick read is an affordable luxury; splashing out on a Booker prize-winning hardback isn’t always so easy. Considering that 5.2 million people in the UK are functionally illiterate, can we afford to look down on anyone for not reading the “right kind” of book?

I’ve been too ill to read in the past, so audiobooks were a lifesaver, just as they are for many disabled people. Stephen King recommends them in his book On Writing, but when I mentioned this to a friend she said: “It’s not really reading though, is it?” It was to me.

We have to get over the idea that spending hours in a mahogany chair, frowning over a leather-bound volume from 1623 is the best way to absorb information. And let’s be honest: some authors waffle on, whether because they were paid by the word or their agents were too polite to tell them to stop. Many more writers would benefit from being condensed – that’s the long and the short of it.