8 Wednesday February 16 2022 | the timesarts
before giving up — named in homage
to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History
of Time, supposedly the most unread
book of all time. “It’s an opportunity
to graze in categories that people
wouldn’t necessarily go out and
purchase. Thomas Piketty’s Capital is
900 pages and 15 hours’ reading. Will
I buy it? Maybe not. But I sure may
want to talk about that at the dinner
table if somebody else brings it up.”
Aah, so Uptime is about helping you
bluff over a plate of lasagne at your
neighbour’s. Do authors object to their
works being condensed in this way?
“As a journalist by training it would
be dishonest of me to object to the
idea of acquiring dinner party-level
knowledge,” says Oliver Burkeman,
laughing. “I’ve spent decades of my
life doing exactly that.” His book Four
Thousand Weeks, published last year to
good reviews, is about how most of us
have just 4,000 weeks on this planet;
we should enjoy our time, not stress
about ensuring that it is productive.
I presumed Burkeman would be
appalled about it being on the app.
Uptime, after all, is the antithesis of
his philosophy. But he is remarkably
relaxed. “I guess I should be insulted,
but it’s a compliment in some ways
that someone wants to summarise it.”
I spent a week on Uptime; I’m not
sure I felt cleverer by the end. The
“hacks” were a great introduction to
the books but at no stage did I feel
that I was “reading” them. I missed
the author’s tone of voice, and the
fact that every idea was stripped down
to an “insight”, without any of the
examples or anecdotes to bolster that
insight, felt very reductive.
The moment I stopped trying to
learn from the “insights”, however, and
saw the app as a glorified afternoon
in a good bookshop, I enjoyed it far
more. And I even bought one of the
books. Inadvertently Uptime may help
me to increase my book total this year.How to appear well-read (without
DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES; JEAN-PHILIPPE BALTEL/SIPA/SHUTTERSTOCK; JOHN KEATLEY/REUTERS“It uses the same
techniques of
structures and
plotting, tone of
voice, pacing. If it
can be reduced
to 1,200 words,
should it even
be a book in
the first
place?”
This is a good
point, but one ignored by many
publishers. Even voracious readers
can become overwhelmed by the
volume of biographies, histories and
supposedly groundbreaking works
about the planet, our health and sex
lives that come out every month.
This is the view of the Uptime
co-founder Patrick Walker, 54. “People
have limited time, but people have a
lot of information overload as well.”
He freely admits that, as a former
executive at Facebook and YouTube,
he may have contributed to that
problem. “I wanted to commit myself
to help solve some of these pain
points: this lack of time, short
attention span, lack of resources.”
We speak over video — he splits his
time between Lisbon, where his family
are based, and London, where Uptime
has its offices. With his theatrically
thick scarf, baseball cap and easy
Pacific Northwest manner he looks
as if he should be running a juice
company rather than an app.
Uptime, he says, is for two groups
of people. The first are those who just
don’t read: the 47 per cent of Brits who
did not pick up a single book last year,
yet “feel this sort of knowledge fomo
[fear of missing out]”.
The second group are readers with
an ever-growing pile of books, which
he wants to help them to whizz
through. These might score highly on
the Hawking index, which measures
how much of a book someone readsNo time for those big books everyone talks about?
With a new app you can grasp Hawking, Piketty
and Gladwell in five minutes. Harry Wallop tried it
H
ow many books did
you read last year?
I felt inadequate for
managing no more
than 11, after all the
hours I spent glued
to Netflix, Twitter
and the government’s
pandemic press conferences. But it
turns out this figure puts me into the
“heavy reader” category, as classified
by the market research agency Kantar.
Just 35 per cent of Brits read ten or
more books a year, and about half the
UK population read none at all. This
year I vowed to do better. And it’s
going well. In fact, I polished off three
books yesterday, and some of these
were hefty, serious tomes written by
Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger.
If you are sceptical as to how —
with the distractions of children,
phone, dog — I managed to race
through so many books, you’re right. I
cheated. Or rather, used a “knowledge
hack”. The idea is, instead of picking
up the book, you open the Uptime
app on your smartphone, browse its
3,000 non-fiction titles and click.
You then have two options. You can
read the “hack”, which is the book
crunched down to 1,200 words with
a few “favourite quotes”, or you can
“watch” the book, which is the book, in
effect, as a PowerPoint presentation,
broken up with the occasional
one-minute video of the author, a
diagram or an illustration. The books
are reduced to an overview, “three key
insights” — each one of which is
expanded on with seven or eight
separate slides — and a “take action”
section before the final “wrap up”.Including watching the little videos,
it took me ten minutes to get through
John Bolton’s 592-page The Room
Where It Happened, his critique of the
Trump presidency. The Exponential
Age by Azeem Azhar, 352 pages about
how Google, Facebook and other tech
giants are growing faster than society
can contain them, took seven minutes.
To you, this may sound like a joyless
way to consume a book, reducing
biographies or philosophical works to
a few sentences: Heidegger as fridge
magnet; Long Walk to Freedom
shortened to an Instagram post. To
others it may seem invaluable.
Uptime isn’t the first book summary
service on the market (there’s Blinkist,
Instaread and Microbooks) — indeed,
it’s part long tradition. As Joe Moran,
a professor of English at Liverpool
John Moores University, points out,
Reader’s Digest did it every month, and
Classics Illustrated, which started in
the 1940s, transformed Shakespeare
into comic-book form. “But I’m not
sure why you would want to,” he says.
“Reading is a process and a pleasure
you can’t condense into a ‘takeaway’.”
Reading novels may be a pleasure,
but the books that Uptime mostly
focuses on are those you find in an
airport WH Smith or the “big think”
section at the front of Waterstones:
Steve Jobs’s biography; The Art of War;
anything by Malcolm Gladwell. The
sort of books that busy executives like
to claim they are reading on their
holiday yachts. Aren’t they precisely
the books that could do with being
reduced to a few key points?
“For me the best non-fiction is
continuous with fiction,” Moran says.It would be
dishonest
of me to
object to
the idea of
acquiring
dinner
party-level
knowledge
Bernardine Evaristo Thomas Piketty Michelle Obama Bill GatesThe Uptime app is
available on Apple
and Android devices;
uptime.app