The case against brevity

The summarization industry profits from our declining ability to focus

Friedrich Nietzsche, Wikimedia Commons

In 2012, three young Germans had an idea to put their book notes into compact summaries. Thus was born Blinkist, a company built on the premise that knowledge, neatly packaged into 15-minute soundbites, would solve the dual problem of our desire to keep up with information and our scarcity of time. They called these…