No thanks, I’ll do it myself

/ Alex Good

I don’t like reading from a screen, and when I get sent books for review I usually ask for print copies if they’re available. But sometimes they aren’t, which usually means I get them sent to me in a pdf format.

Recently Adobe updated and I noticed that, in the evolution toward everything AI all the time, they’ve added a function that allows you to condense a 300-page novel down to less than 10 pages of summary. “This appears to be a long document,” the prompt says. “Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant.” That’s probably helpful in some lines of work, and perhaps (more disturbingly) of use to students, but it’s not for me. I don’t read books in order to “save time,” and I don’t see the point of buying a book and then just reading what used to be known as the Reader’s Digest condensed version.

And yet that seems to be something that’s now being incorporated into the form books increasingly take. How many people will be able to resist clicking on that little button? I don’t think it’s alarmist to think that what is being presented as a helpful tool is just another step in the extinction of the book, and of reading.

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