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Nonfiction books should be at the end of the funnel
Books take a long time to read. Maybe 10-20 hours. I think that there are two things that you should almost always do first.
Read a summary. This usually gives you the 80/20 and only takes 5-10 minutes. You can usually find a summary by googling around. Derek Sivers and James Clear come to mind as particularly good resources.
Listen to a podcast or talk. Nowadays, from what I could tell, authors typically go on a sort of podcast tour before releasing a book in order to promote it. I find that this typically serves as a good ~hour long overview of the important parts of the book. For more prominent authors, sometimes they'll also give a talk - eg. Talks at Google - after releasing.
I think it really depends on your reading speed. If you can read at 500 wpm, then it's probably faster for you to just read the book than search around for a podcast and then listen to said podcast. I do agree, though, that reading a summary or a blog about the topic is often a good replacement for reading an entire book.
then it's probably faster for you to just read the book than search around for a podcast and then listen to said podcast
I'm having trouble seeing how that'd ever be the case. In my experience searching for a podcast rarely takes more than a few minutes, so let's ignore that part of the equation.
If a book normally takes 10 hours to read, let's say you're a particularly fast reader and can read 5x as fast as the typical person (which I'm skeptical of). That'd mean it still takes 2 hours to read the book. Podcast episodes are usually about an hour. But if ... (read more)