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

Many readers will recoil from these radically boiled-down versions of titles like A Brief History of Time. Me too, until I started reading them

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.

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