The contentification of books: Are books just becoming another thing to put on our social media feeds?

A recent report in the Hindu by Pranavi Sharma states that concise non-fiction books are becoming increasingly popular with readers in India. In a reflection of this, three dedicated series from publishers are now available: Aleph Book Company’s ‘Essential India Editions’, Pan Macmillan India's ‘The Shortest History’ series, and their ‘Edible Series’ from Reaktion Books, with condensed histories of civilisations and food.

Books like these, as well as self-help guides such as James Clear’s Atomic Habits, the report goes on to say, suggest a growing appetite for practical, actionable non-fiction. It also points to how shrinking attention spans, rising prices, and reduced leisure time are reshaping reading habits.

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These are plausible reasons, and they’ve been commented on before. That said, the books can certainly serve as valuable guides and stepping stones to a more in-depth understanding of the subjects. But the appeal of such volumes reflects a broader turn in how books are being viewed nowadays.

Increasingly, they are being seen as content: part of an information stream to be consumed and processed. Books have become a part of the attention economy, competing with reels, podcasts, explainers, newsletters, and the occasional motivational LinkedIn post.

A volume’s value, in this context, lies not in the experience of reading it but in the utility gained and sometimes, the dinner party talking points provided. Reading becomes a task to be optimised rather than an experience to be inhabited. Reading goals are tracked like fitness milestones, and achievements are communicated to the world.

Literature in the attention economy

When it comes to longer volumes, Blinkist and its imitators will provide you with the “key insights” of a book in fifteen minutes or less. As though books are simply mineral seams from which information has to be extracted. The use of AI will only accelerate this tendency, with instant summaries and perspectives.

The times don’t just demand that we optimise our consumption; they also demand that we broadcast it.  The internet is full of evidence of books being used for such purposes. Take a look at the innumerable online photographs of titles artfully positioned next to coffee cups, aesthetic shelfies, and videos where someone announces that a novel “destroyed them emotionally”.

To be honest, much of this is not entirely unprecedented. The desire to understand a book without spending too much time doing the reading is not recent. Consider abridged editions, Readers’ Digest condensed books, and Cliff Notes, for example. And the person who arranges books on shelves and tables to impress visitors has been with us since book jackets were invented.

The difference today is with scale and feedback. The same performance is broadcast to thousands, and rewarded with likes, follows, and social validation, not to mention everyone’s favourite word when it comes to content: monetisation.

Books have always been social objects. Now, they are social content, meant to be consumed and profited from, metaphorically or literally.

This resonates with many in India, shaped by decades of competitive exam culture. It fits neatly into an educational system that trains generations to find the correct answer and feel dissatisfied with anything that can’t be converted into output. After all, why sit with ambiguity for three hundred pages when a summary exists, complete with actionable takeaways and a thumbnail optimised for an Instagram post?

The enduring power of the longer book

There is hope yet, however slender. Books have, so far at least, survived technologies that were supposed to render them obsolete: television, the internet, the smartphone. They did this by offering something unique: the private experience of one consciousness speaking to another. When a reader can recognise some of their own traits in a character, or follow an argument to a conclusion, it rearranges something in their thinking, hopefully for the better.

Readers who begin with the slim volume or the app summary sometimes find their way, eventually, to the longer, harder book that resists being processed. Perhaps that initial curiosity sharpens into something else: the desire not just to know the basics, but to find what cannot be reduced to a takeaway.