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zabzonk 2 hours ago [-]
I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
david927 5 hours ago [-]
I had a good friend who did this -- was a reader for a movie studio, looking for adaptations. Everyone teased him for having such a great job.
TylerE 2 hours ago [-]
I kinda feel that's like "video game tester". Sounds great from the outside, but I bet he spent 90% of time reading absolute dreck.
NooneAtAll3 27 minutes ago [-]
the worst part isn't even the garbage, it's the "good plot written in very bad way"
you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it
ourmandave 12 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how he felt about holiday vacation book report assignments back in school.
yankee_dodge 2 hours ago [-]
Robert Redford's character in _Three Days of the Condor_ gets asked what he does for a living. "I read." Has always seemed to be the ideal job. :-)
sharkjacobs 5 hours ago [-]
> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
From studio output, it feels like all they read are graphic novels
stevenwoo 17 minutes ago [-]
He says he mainly summarizes plot and that the qualities of the writing are not important. It seems like that would miss opportunities - for instance he didn’t think Vineland was adaptable and didn’t even recognize One Battle After Another as the adaptation when he saw it until the credits rolled. Another example, IMHO Arrival is a beautiful adaptation that improves upon the original short story mostly by addition, or maybe it’s cause Amy Adams is more charismatic than the character in my imagination.
dylan604 3 minutes ago [-]
Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption are good examples of the adaptation being an improvement. Then again, adaptations are usually a novel being adapted for a shorter telling rather than a short story being elaborated.
ASalazarMX 4 hours ago [-]
I was skeptical, but the article starts with Train Dreams, which according to HowLongToRead, would take 2 hours at 300 WPM.
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
Can't say I ever took a test like that. 644wpm and 100% in English (native language).
Hard to judge that based on just five questions though.
daveshistory 2 hours ago [-]
You will feel more judged when you score 67% like me.
Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.
CobaltFire 47 minutes ago [-]
I think it gives various passages and questions from a bank.
Mine was a paragraph about small loans to poor populations, and had five questions.
daveshistory 4 hours ago [-]
I'm curious what these tests are measuring if you say your reading comprehension is only 50%. Your comment here is completely articulate and sensible so you are obviously fluent in English.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
ASalazarMX 4 hours ago [-]
It hurts, doesn't it? I also thought a few measly questions would be a piece of cake, and mainly focused on speed.
daveshistory 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't consciously focus on speed. I just completely overestimated my ability to skim. Interesting. I think I actually would have done better when I was younger and used to doing these things in school. I obviously don't read as carefully as I used to.
Makes you wonder what else you're missing.
dylan604 3 hours ago [-]
In high school, there was an academic event for reading comprehension. I tried it one time and was humiliated. They read aloud to you a story, and then they ask you questions about it after. I have no idea where my head was, as I didn't do well at all. I never tried the event again. It wasn't until that experience before I realized that I'm the type that needs to read things multiple times for it to stick.
daveshistory 2 hours ago [-]
I feel like in high school I would have scored better on this. I was overconfident. I skimmed it quickly, like anything I would have done at work, and figured I'd sort of internalize the main points. Like I think I do at work.
Oops.
testaccount28 3 hours ago [-]
2000 WPM @ 75%
4 hours ago [-]
mrandish 2 hours ago [-]
To me the interesting question about a job like this is "How can you tell if you're doing it well?" It involves such high-stakes, high-uncertainty and highly variability that it has to be nearly impossible to know. I mean you're predicting distant outcomes from creative pursuits which must first survive a gauntlet of wicked complexity and randomness.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
dhdaadhd 1 hours ago [-]
Please tell more!
oinoom 5 hours ago [-]
I started to find this article interesting but every time I tapped “x” on an ad to dismiss it, no more than five seconds later, the same ad would appear at the bottom and distract me. Over and over.
asdff 5 hours ago [-]
The internet is so much better blocking ads.
ASalazarMX 4 hours ago [-]
If someone has the will to fight those little xs, they have the will to install uBlock Origin. It even works on iPad and iPhone now, through a regular Safari Plugin.
dieselgate 4 hours ago [-]
All my xs live in Texas.... and uBlock Origin even works on my locked down work Dell with firefox!
readthenotes1 4 hours ago [-]
So you're saying your PC is in Tennessee? Or is that just your VPN?
sorta piling on here, but it's also worth noting that this problem goes away (and the article is quite readable) in a browser with javascript turned off (and no adblocker).
mncharity 2 hours ago [-]
"I read books [...] I've read a couple of books a week for [...] 50 [years]"[1] - Jim Keller (CPU designer) with Lex Fridman.
I read two books a day in middle school. Still my favorite time to look back on…
garciasn 3 hours ago [-]
TIL I can get paid for doing what I do for fun: reading ~100 books a year.
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
cortesoft 2 hours ago [-]
The title is misleading, he isn't paid to read books he is paid to write an executive summary evaluating a book's suitability for film. The reading is just required for him to do his actual job.
mrandish 2 hours ago [-]
While he reads books in his job, what he's actually paid for is quickly synthesizing what he's read into actionable judgements assessing whether (and in what ways) those books have potential to be adapted into commercial film scripts. His assessments are ~10 to ~20 pages, and while being free-form to some extent, still follow fairly evolved standards for format, structure, criteria and terminology.
deepsun 2 hours ago [-]
Don't make a work off your hobby, you'll stop loving that.
"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
laughing_man 2 minutes ago [-]
True for me. I used to love writing software. About fifteen years into my career I lost interest in side projects, and by the time I retired anything that smacks of coding seems like drudgery.
I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if the start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily true for everyone, either of them. Both parts feel too dogmatic, it always depends.
nomadiccoder 3 hours ago [-]
> even allowing for time off, that works out to roughly 300 books a year, or well over 6,000 across two decades. And that is just the professional tally.
garciasn 2 hours ago [-]
Every other day is ~3/week which is between 150 and 180/year; not 300.
He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
> He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
garciasn 2 hours ago [-]
Ah; that makes more sense. Thank you kind HNer.
nomadiccoder 2 hours ago [-]
im just quoting the article
foo-bar-baz529 4 hours ago [-]
This seems like the kind of profession that AI would’ve already destroyed. Aren’t LLMs pretty good at what he’s doing?
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2 hours ago [-]
Can't be any worse than what Hollywood puts out already.
nephihaha 4 hours ago [-]
I would imagine this sucks the fun out of some books and also forces you to read a lot of dreadful books. I knew a bibliophile who worked for a publisher and was sad to hear from him that he rarely got time to read for pleasure.
ASalazarMX 4 hours ago [-]
Isn't this a work-life balance issue? I work 8 hours a day on my work computer(s), yet I'm still eager to use my home computer for hobbies or pleasure.
This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
killbot5000 2 hours ago [-]
How does he stay awake??
seabombs 3 hours ago [-]
Boring isn't it? Reading half a book every single day.
Not for him though, he loves it.
dyauspitr 3 hours ago [-]
This is LLM territory and they are extremely good at it.
devilsdata 2 hours ago [-]
For executives looking to impress? Not really. Being able to rattle off perspective on a book, curated by someone with very high media literacy would signal the same level of media literacy to their audience.
An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books.
Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
There really isn’t anymore. It can ape anyone’s style well, including insights and almost no one can reliably tell if something is AI or not.
saltcured 43 minutes ago [-]
It's a fascinating question. I took the GPP as "media literacy" as more of an elite culture shibboleth. Making the right references in this sort of elitist signalling process is more about showing alignment to your contemporaries. It is just as much making the right references and omitting other references.
Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus.
An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.
michaelsbradley 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
anoncow 4 hours ago [-]
With exceptions, after sometime everything can bring you down or nothing can bring you down.
you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it
https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
https://speedreadr.com/es/
Hard to judge that based on just five questions though.
Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.
Mine was a paragraph about small loans to poor populations, and had five questions.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
Makes you wonder what else you're missing.
Oops.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5039s
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if the start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.
He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
Not for him though, he loves it.
An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books.
Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus.
An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.