I suppose the headline “Finding the time to read” is a bit misleading. I find the time to read every day. I peruse many online media outlets, social networks, blogs, and various other information locales on the information superhighway. However, when if comes to opening a book–bound with paper and bereft of hyperlinks–it seems I can never find the time.

John sent me a post by Scott Karp entitled The Evolution From Linear Thought to Networked Thought. Scott, a former Lit major, reflects on how he was formally a voracious book reader and nowadays finds himself reading mostly from online sources. One of the reasons he cites is that with online reading, the process is non-linear: when something of interest pops up in his reading, he can follow a link, or go search out more information from Google.

It is this ability to tap into the networked-thought of the Internet that makes reading books less and less a part of my day to day life. Of course, print materials still have tremendous value and it’s not as if the invention of the internet has destroyed the necessity for books. I presently have a few web skills related books on my shelf (Javascript and AJAX) and these technical-skills related print materials still have quite a bit of market share.
Benefits include:

• Being written by renowned authorities rather than random bloggers
• Increasing the complexity of the material from chapter to chapter
• Rounding up solid examples of concepts in one place, without having to scour the interwebs

Of course, if I had the time and the motivation, I could probably round up quite a few in-depth blog posts and articles about the topics these books cover, but that would take time…not only to find the articles, but to verify the expertise of the sources. Yet, as convenient as technical publications can be in our industry, their shelf-life can be short lived as technology improves and material becomes out dated!

I guess I need to learn to step away from my computer for a bit each day and crack open a book!