Part II: Augmented Reading: Learn 10x Faster & Better With AI (And Get Paid To Learn)

Author’s Note

In Augmented Reading: Learn 10x Faster And Better With AI, I introduced a new form of AI-accelerated learning called Augmented Reading. Read it now if you can. It sets important context for today’s post and future posts on the future of learning.

This Post Is A Mega-Post

Free subscribers receive:

Today’s 6,000+ word post, which provides an overview of the #1 way that people can improve their learning and thinking with AI (that I’m aware of).

Yes, this is a super long article, but I think it’s important enough that it’s worth the extra words. Rather than glossing over years of insights, I wanted to fully explain each one so that the accompanying tactics make sense.

At the same time, I also provide a detailed summary of the post at the top for all of you skimmers.

Paid subscribers also receive $1,000+ in value throughout the week:

To not overload you with a 15,000 word article, I broke down the article into a series of shorter posts that will be sent out on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

These posts include:

• Step-by-step GPT tutorial on how to create your own GPTs so you can use AI to learn faster and make money. Understanding OpenAI’s GPTs is critical to Augmented Reading.

• Breakdown of BookGPTs. Provides an overview of exactly how you can use GPTs to create five different types of GPTs for EVERY book. This includes the Personalized Books, Research Brief, Thinking Brief, Action Brief, and Coach. For each of these, I will give an overview of why each part of it is important and how to use those parts to create value in your life.

• Full access to my own suite BookGPTs Prompts so you can use it and get inspiration for your own bot.

• Q&A in the comments so you can ask me a question if you run into a challenge creating your bot.

And a special live masterclass on Thursday…

• Access to a BookGPT Q&A call this Thursday at 1-2 pm EST. I will walk you through how to use and customize the BookGPTs and answer any questions you have.

Today’s Post Summary

AI has crossed a critical inflection point

• IMHO, it’s worth redoing your whole workflow based on AI. For the high-level knowledge worker, AI is no longer just a cool toy that may or may not live up to its hype. It’s no longer something that is moderately helpful like a free intern. With its current features, it can immediately and dramatically improve how you learn, think, and write. You just need to know how to use it.
  

• I am putting my money where my mouth is. I use AI for 3-4 hours per day and am augmenting every step of my thought leadership process with AI. More specifically, I’m putting in a lot of effort into using AI to get more from books.
  

Books are amazing, but they have big downsides

• One of the big opportunities for learning has historically come from nonfiction books. Books capture the best and most timeless ideas of top experts in their most refined and thorough form while also being super affordable and fun to collect.
  

• But, books have major downsides. The problem with books is that they require a lot of time and concentration to complete—more than most people are willing to give. Furthermore, most of the value of a book comes from what you do after you read it, and this also takes more time, energy, and skill that most people don’t have.
  

Book derivatives (i.e., summaries, author interviews, and author speeches) have exploded in the last 10 years to improve the overall book reading experience

• Book summaries make it easier for readers to consume the main ideas of books. This is why there is a whole cottage industry of people creating and posting free book summaries online (James Clear, Four Minute Books, Nat Eliason, etc). Not only that, there is now an industry of companies creating book summary memberships (Blinkist, Shortform, GetAbstract, SparkNotes, ReadinGraphics, Instaread) and apps (Headway, Storyshots, 12min, Bookey).
  

• Book summaries also help their creators learn faster and earn money. One of the best ways to learn faster is to teach what you learn. This is known as the Explanation Effect. By creating a book summary, for example, individuals can learn from a book more deeply and create a thought leader asset that can be sold or drive traffic.
  

AI puts the book derivatives market on steroids

• AI enables a whole suite of other derivatives that enable their creators to make money and learn more. Over my entire lifetime, I’ve read thousands of books. Around 2015, I started to become extremely deliberate about identifying the most valuable parts of books to extract and how to convert those parts into value. Below are the five different types of book derivative opportunities I see now:
  

  • Personalized Book Summary: Have a GPT summarize the right sections of the book in the way you love— for your learning style, life situation, profession, goals, immediate situation, level of expertise on the topic, and values.
    

  • Research Brief: Extract keywords, resources, experts, excerpts, visual summaries, examples, metaphors, and ideas from the book (and other research adjacent to the book for greater context).
    

  • Thinking Brief: Extract and generate lessons, implications, predictions, second-order effects, alternative perspectives, timelines, reinterpretations of past events based on new data, opportunities for further investigation, resonance & conflicts with other ideas in the field, etc., so that you can synthesize the insights with your own knowledge and experiences in order to create your own ideas. This one is particularly relevant to thought leaders.
    

  • Action Brief: Extract mindsets, hacks, resources, paradigms, and frameworks from the book that you can immediately put to work across your entire life in a course format.
    

  • Coach: Work with a coach trained on the book who quizzes you, assesses you, asks you reflection questions in a conversational manner, and even role-plays with you. For example, if a book is about negotiation, you could role-play a negotiation strategy and get feedback on what you did well and didn’t do well. I’ve done this, and it works great.
    

• The specific feature that makes creating book derivatives super easy for anyone is ChatGPT’s new GPT bot feature. Put in layman’s language, GPTs allow you to ‘save’ a prompt you use regularly, share it with others, and even sell it. Put differently, GPTs allow you to create a software program without the hassle of needing to understand how to code, pay money for lots of software, learn lots of tools to build an app, or hire a team of high-priced experts. This is a big deal because once you have GPT for any book, you can customize it for any other book in minutes. The hard part is the upfront cost to create and test the GPT.
  

• This long-term trend of book derivatives and remix culture, more broadly, is just getting started. As more of the world becomes digital, AI evolves, and new tools for capturing and remixing media become better, we will see more and better remixes.

Now On To The Full Post…

In order for a book to change your life, it must do five things to your brain:

1. Be read

2. Be understood

3. Be remembered

4. Be applied

5. Deliver results

Without these things, a book is just words on paper.

Here’s the problem though…

Many people conflate reading and learning:

What’s key to understand, though, is that reading is just the first step of the universal learning process, which I call The Learning Loop…

The information we absorb must be transformed in our brains to make it understandable and usable. Then, we must take action in the real world to get results. Finally, feedback from the real world helps us improve the whole learning process before we go through the loop again.

Looking at text and expecting to learn is not far from looking at food and expecting to get its nutrients. We need to digest our life experiences just like we digest our food. Without some form of active processing, almost everything we read is lost within weeks.

This brings me to AI.

What’s special about the emergence of advanced AI is that it gives us an opportunity to reimagine book reading from first principles in order to make it:

• More effective for learning

• Easier so you can be more consistent

• Enjoyable so the experience brings you alive

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending 3-4 hours per day using ChatGPT because using AI is now deeply integrated into my reading, thinking, and writing workflow. It's not just helping me do the same work better; it’s also helping me reimagine what my work is in the first place.

This experience has given me a unique perspective on how reading and learning will evolve this year. This article will share my biggest lessons learned on how to 10x your learning with Augmented Reading.

It will contrast almost all of the content I’m seeing right now on AI, prompts, and learning…

Why My Approach To AI Is Different

When I first started with AI, I went all in. I subscribed to every newsletter, podcast, and YouTube show in order to learn from what others had already figured out.

Over time, I realized that most of the content was just noise:

• A lot of the tools recommended were unproven beta tools that wouldn’t be around in a few months.

• The prompt packs were often just a few sentences and mediocre.

• A lot of content focused on theories, predictions, and gossip about when the main players would release new features and what those could mean in the future.

• A lot of the crazy demo videos were for products that wouldn’t be truly useful for months or even years.

At a certain point, it just felt like everything I was reading was hype rather than something immediately and dramatically useful.

When I used ChatGPT myself, I found the results somewhat helpful. But, in the end, I found it easier to do most things without it.

So, I stepped away from AI for several months in order to wait for a big breakthrough that would justify jumping back in again.

Then, something interesting happened a few months ago.

ChatGPT “sneakily” got good enough to be immediately and dramatically practical.

While there wasn’t one huge breakthrough, ChatGPT had silently released a slew of updates that added up to a breakthrough. This is what my journey looked like…

As I created more prompts, I noticed I had a unique approach that was different than what I was seeing.

At the risk of being cocky, I was creating much deeper and more useful prompts.

Reflecting on it now, I think this happened for three reasons…

• I am deeply curious. Part of what excites me about using a tool like ChatGPT isn’t just creating prompts to get a result. Rather, part of what interests me is actually understanding how ChatGPT works at a fundamental level. How is it different than how humans think? Why can it do amazing feats sometimes and then fail at the most basic tasks? If you could see me prompting, you would see that a significant percentage of my questions are asking it questions every time there is a “misunderstanding.” The back-and-forths look more like generative conversations that evolve based on mutual understanding rather than just providing a single prompt and expecting the perfect answer. Over time, this has given me a better understanding of what ChatGPT can and cannot do.
  

• Mental models gave me unique perspectives about how to use AI. Over the last 5 years, I’ve collected and created Mastery Manuals for dozens of the most useful and universal mental models in the world in my Mental Model Club. These proven, timeless, and universal frameworks provide new and deeper perspectives on AI rather than quick hacks.
  

• My deep expertise in thought leadership allowed me to create 10x better prompts. Because I had spent years and thousands of hours deliberately studying, applying, and teaching the tactics, strategies, frameworks, and workflows for learning, thinking, and writing, I was able to come up with more complex, useful, and nuanced prompts I didn’t see anywhere else.

For example, I could imagine 120+ sequential prompts off the bat that could integrate with each other into a chain because I had developed a Blockbuster Blueprint Model, which breaks down the steps of thought leadership into its smallest sequential steps, each of which can be a prompt.

I knew that breaking things down into their smallest steps was incredibly important because of my several hundred-hour deep dive into the history of the assembly line and how the productivity of manual work increased by 50x in the 20th century. Before the assembly line, people would need to apprentice for years to learn many different skills. After the assemblyline, someone who was inexperienced could walk in off the street and start immediately adding value. This occurred because the average task on an assembly line was one minute.

Not only that, because of my understanding of thought leadership, I could understand many potential solutions for each mediocre response I got from ChatGPT. This allowed me to iterate on many prompts over and over until they were continually useful.

Bottom line:

At a fundamental level, being good with ChatGPT isn’t just based on finding good prompts. It’s based on extreme curiosity about ChatGPT, deeper thinking skills, and a refined understanding of the domain you’re asking it to help with.

This post, along with Augmented Reading: Learn 10x Faster And Better With AI, are my first attempts to share what I’m learning about ChatGPT based on deeper thinking, and it’s extremely practical.

This brings me to several uncomfortable truths about reading as it exists today…

These 5 Brutal Truths About Reading Show That We’re Silently Suffering From “Wallpaper Syndrome” When It Comes To Books

Image created in MidJourney and edited in Pixelmator by me

Imagine you've got this funky wallpaper in your living room. At first, it's all you can see—the loud patterns, the eye-popping colors. But then, day in and day out, it just fades into the background of your life. It's still there, but you've stopped noticing it. It’s like you have rose-tinted glasses that mute the bright colors.

Now, let's swap out that wallpaper for a problem. Not just any problem. One of those sneaky, persistent ones that's been hanging around so long it might as well pay rent. At first, it's all you think about, but over time, it becomes part of the scenery of your daily existence. You start to treat it like that piece of furniture you keep bumping your toe on but never move. You see it, but you don't really see it. It's there, blending into the background noise of your life, silently chipping away at your happiness like a termite.

But here's the thing: just because you've stopped noticing it, doesn't mean it's stopped being a problem. It's still there, taking up space, making your life less than it could be.

Books as they exist today have fallen prey to Wallpaper Syndrome. They have serious drawbacks that we’ve accepted simply because they have been around for so long that these challenges have become invisible. So it’s time to take notice of these pesky problems.

These 5 brutal truths about reading books are the new coat of paint we need to see books differently…

1. Most people don’t even pick up the books they purchase. The phenomenon of purchasing books with the intention of reading them, only to let them sit unread on shelves or digital devices, is so common it has a name—Tsundoku.
   

2. Most people never finish the books they start. Almost all of the popular highlights on Amazon Kindle are in the first 10% of the book, as most people don’t get much further. Survey after survey backs this up.
   

3. Of the people who do finish a book, most remember very little a few weeks later. After years of coaching people one-on-one on learning, I know that most people listen to audiobooks and then have trouble recalling even basic facts about them just a few weeks later.
   

4. Few people have a consistent, deliberate learning approach to turn a book’s insights into results. In Why Books Don’t Work, Andy Matuschak explains why being deliberate is so hard: “The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of [metacognition / reflecting on your thinking] skills and that many adults lack them [1]. Worse, even if readers know how to do all these things, the process is quite taxing. Readers must juggle both the content of the book and also all these meta-questions. People particularly struggle to multitask like this when the content is unfamiliar [2].
   

5. As people’s attention spans become shorter, the bar to keep people’s attention is getting higher. Books compete for people’s attention with YouTube, TV, movies, games, and short-form videos. And while many of these other forms of content rapidly evolve, books stay the same. The following chart about teen reading habits drives this point home:

   

On the one hand, you could just say that all of these problems are not problems with books. Rather, they are problems with how people use books. On the other hand, we should accept that how people use a product is the product. If most people are using a product and getting the same error message back, then we shouldn’t just blame the user.

Bottom line:

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love buying and reading books as much as anyone else. Books still have incredible value, and their sales continue to rise. Here’s why…

7 Reasons Why I Still Love Reading Books

To understand how to augment our reading experience with AI, we also need to understand what makes books so amazing. This will stop us from throwing away the baby with the bathwater…

1. Books share authors’ best ideas. Writing and publishing a book is incredibly time-intensive. Authors can only write so many. This means they have to make tough choices about which ones are worth writing. Not only that, if the author is working with a publisher, they have to convince their agent and editor that their book is worth writing. In other words, books must leap over several quality hurdles before they are published.
   

2. Books are refined. Authors revisit ideas in a book over and over and also get feedback from many others. As a result, the words, ideas, structures, stories, and examples are all better. Because books are harder to update than social media, authors spend a lot more time dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s.
   

3. Books are thorough. Books explore ideas deeply. This means things like connecting ideas to other ideas, including relevant research, exploring more implications, providing deep context, and exploring ideas from more angles.
   

4. Book reading isn’t distracting. Imagine reading a book with an ad that looks like content every 200 words. Imagine constantly getting notifications as you read. That's what reading on a website or social media is like.
   

5. Books feel great. Somehow, when we feel, smell, and see a book, it goes deeper into our minds. Research backs this up. Not just that; books inspire wonder. Just as gazing at billions of stars in the night sky gives us a sense of humility and wonder, so too does being surrounded by books in our libraries.
   

6. Books aren’t sorted by newness and popularity. It is in the nature of social media (and even podcasts) to present the newest, most popular, and entertaining content to you based on what you’ve liked or followed in the past. While this algorithm is great for entertainment, it is terrible for learning. I call this phenomenon Junk Learning. For learning, it’s much better to get the opposite algorithm: best of all time, rare and valuable, and something new that will blow your mind from someone new. Books make it easier to avoid addictive newsfeeds and maximize for learning.
   

7. Books are a great value. Books hold incredible amounts of knowledge for just $10-$25, which is significantly less than most courses. The value is especially high when you consider that authors spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours on their books. So, in some ways, you’re getting access to their time at the rate of one penny per hour of their time.

Bottom line:

When considering what format is best for finding life-changing ideas most easily, it’s important to compare the pros and cons of different options.

Whereas social media posts are typically people’s best thoughts of the day—unedited, explored on a surface level, and fragmented—books are people’s best thoughts of the decade—heavily edited and deeply explored. Oddly, the constraints and difficulties of book publishing make it of higher quality than the ease of social media.

At the same time, social media is amazing for entering real-time conversations on topics where getting the latest info is critical.

Put differently, reading social media is like going to small comedy clubs and seeing comedians work out their new material in 10-minute sets. Reading books is like watching the one-hour special they do after testing and refining every joke for more than a year.

Now that we better understand the pros and cons of reading books, a new question emerges…

How can we imagine a better book without destroying what makes them awesome?

Said differently, how can we get the benefits of distraction-free, refined, and thorough high-quality ideas while also getting the benefits of memorization, understanding, transformation, and real-life results?

To answer this question, it's essential to pause and reflect on a timeless innovation principle that perfectly applies to reading and learning innovation…

Chesterton’s Fence: Seek First To Understand, Then To Innovate

Image Credit: Tapan Desai

Chesterton's Fence is a rule of thumb that originates from G.K. Chesterton, a writer, philosopher, and critic. It’s so useful that it was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite heuristics.

Chesterton posits a scenario where a reformer encounters a fence across a road and, not seeing the use of it, says,

"I don't see the use of this. Let us clear it away."

To which the more intelligent type of reformer counters,

"If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This allegory underscores the importance of understanding the purpose behind existing structures or traditions before attempting to change or remove them. It suggests that every system, rule, or tradition has a reason for its existence, even if that reason is not immediately apparent.

In the realm of books and reading, this insight holds profound significance. Just as one wouldn't tear down a fence without knowing its purpose, as we enter the AI age, we shouldn't attempt to reinvent books without grasping the wisdom embedded in their current form.

Books, as we've inherited them, are not just arbitrary formats but the culmination of centuries of cultural evolution, shaped by both the capabilities and constraints of their times. They represent a delicate balance between form and function, content and accessibility, competition and cooperation.

This understanding will not only prevent us from discarding valuable aspects of the reading experience but also guide us in enhancing books while propelling them into the future.

And we shouldn’t take it for granted that things will automatically just work out. After all, at one point social media was touted as a technology that would bring everyone together, enable deeper relationships, and bring the best information to the top. Today, it is more criticized than lauded.

With that said, let’s jump into a more nuanced understanding of the book publishing industry…

A book today is typically a combination of the following attributes:

• Format

• Publishing model

• Retail model

• Derivatives

Format

The book format resolves a creative tension between multiple forces. On the one hand, if a book is too short, it has a lower perceived value and doesn’t stand out on a physical bookshelf. On the other hand, if a book is too long, then it will be too expensive for readers to buy and perhaps too daunting for them to read. Because of tensions like this, almost all books look something like this:

• Length: 200-ish pages

• Medium: Mostly text

• Structure: Split into chapters

• Sandwiched between:

  • Beginning: Intro and table of contents

  • End: Appendix and index

• Price: $10-$25

• Formats: Paperback, hardcover, ebook, and/or audiobook formats

Publishing & Retail Model

• Authorship: Written by 1-2 authors

• Players: Editors, agent, publisher, and distributor

• Compensation: Authors receive an upfront advance and then 10% of royalties after the publisher recoups the advance

• Publishers: The big five publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan) control 60-70% of the global English-speaking market

• Retailers: Well over 50% of book sales in the United States come from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Over 80% of ebook sales come from Amazon.

Given that five publishing houses control 70% of the English-speaking market globally and that two retailers control well over 50% of the market in the US, it’s hard to imagine radical change in the book format in the next year—or even the next few years.

For example, I’m continually surprised at the fact that my Kindle is painfully slow and virtually the same as it was 10 years ago. Not only that, its only advanced features are search and highlighting. In other words, innovating ebooks is clearly not a priority at Amazon.

Therefore, with virtually no rival upstart threatening the grip of these behemoths, it’s hard to imagine these incumbents starting to become radical innovators.

Derivatives

The more successful a book is, the more derivatives it has. For example….

• Translations

• Journals (i.e., The Clear Habit Journal)

• Workbooks

• Daily reflections (i.e., The Daily Stoic)

• Planner (i.e., The Time-Block Planner)

• Graphic novels

• Spin-offs for different ages (i.e., teens, children)

• Spin-offs for different backgrounds (i.e., Chicken Soup For The [X] Soul)

• Online courses

• Study guides (i.e., quizzes, flashcards)

• Apps (i.e., Universe In A Nutshell)

• Extras (i.e., cheatsheets, glossary, templates, checklists, tutorials, resource list, bonus chapters, up-to-date case studies)

Most books don’t have derivatives beyond these three because it hasn’t made sense in the paradigm of book publishing we’ve lived in. More specifically, most books only sell a few thousand copies at most. Furthermore, authors only earn 10% of book sales as a royalty. This means that authors only earn a few thousand dollars from a book that takes hundreds of hours to thousands of hours to create. That’s basically minimum wage.

Therefore, the size of the audience and the potential profit simply don’t justify creating derivatives. Furthermore, most nonfiction experts don’t write for the money. Beyond impact, they write because having a book makes them more credible, which helps them:

• Get more and higher-paying clients

• Get invited to deliver speeches and conduct interviews

• Become the recognized authority in their niche

Therefore, having derivatives doesn’t necessarily make sense for many authors because it’s not profitable, and it doesn’t add enough to their credibility.

Bottom line: These four attributes of books (format, publishing model, retail model, derivatives) have been surprisingly stable for more than a century, even with the advent of digitization and the Internet.

Now, we’re equipped to explore what will happen in the near future…

This 2010s Trend Has Shaped My Prediction For The Mid-2020s

The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed.
—William Gibson

One of the most basic and most important ways to predict the future is to simply look at trends that have been going on for a long time and extrapolate them. In other words, to ask ourselves…

What are the implications if this trend continues?

Of course, the future does not always reflect the past, but it very often does. And, at the very least, it is always worth seriously exploring the second-order effects of long-run trends continuing.

I first learned this basic principle from a Steve Jobs video where he talked about how the future was surprisingly easy to predict in that you could see many of the trends coming for decades and gradually improving among early adopters until it got good enough to go mainstream.

Upon reflecting on this, I realized he was right. Just consider the following trends that were visible for decades that have changed or will likely change everything:

• The Internet (social media, zero-cost communication, free global communication)

• Digitization (digital media, software, online communication)

• Moore’s Law (second-order effect: miniaturization of computers)

• AI

• AR/VR

After realizing the truth in Jobs’ words, I made a commitment to deeply study the most important and inevitable long-term trends:

• The rate at which they were improving (i.e., Moore’s Law, Swanson’s Law, Rose’s Law, LLM scaling laws, etc.)

• Their likely inflection points where they’d go mainstream

• Their second-order effects once they went mainstream

Two articles that resulted from this that were each read hundreds of thousands of times were:

• Google Director Of Engineering: This Is How Fast The World Will Change In Ten Years

• As The World Is Shaken Up, A 60-Year “Mega-Trend” Quietly Emerges

Using this logic, I started to look for other trends that were smaller but more relevant to online learning.

One of those big trends I saw starting around 2015 was an explosion of three types of free, multimedia book derivatives:

• Book summaries

• Interviews (available on podcast players)

• Speeches (available on YouTube)

I found that for almost any book I wanted to read I could find these condensed versions that hit on the big ideas and the best stories in anywhere from 10 minutes for a book summary to 1 hour for an interview. This realization led me to refine my learning methodology and eventually name my process Fractal Reading. Here’s a quick overview of it.

I also thought that this trend was interesting because of the following quote:

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years
—Chris Dixon, Entrepreneur And Investor

Many of the people doing these interviews and creating these summaries were doing it for free on nights and weekends. Furthermore, Blinkist likely grew to tens of millions of dollars in revenue just by providing book summaries.

Now, imagine if the 2010s are just the beginning of this trend as AI makes it easier and possible to create new types of derivatives.

This leads me to my #1 prediction of what will change…

This Is How Book Reading Will Radically Change By The End Of 2024

In 30 years, the most important cultural works and the most powerful mediums will be those that have been remixed.
—Kevin Kelly, Futurist

I see AI-powered book derivatives as the biggest opportunity for a revolution in the book publishing industry and one of the biggest for learners for several reasons:

• People love books. It builds off the interest that exists in specific books and books in general. For example, book titles are searched hundreds of millions of times per year on Google.

• Derivatives are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to create a derivative as long as you don’t infringe on the author’s copyright.

• Derivates help sell more books. If done right and respectfully, the derivative actually promotes the underlying book and increases sales. For example, book industry sales have continued to increase even as the book summary market has exploded.

• AI changes the game. AI drastically reduces the costs of creating derivatives while enabling new forms of interaction. More on this in the next section.

• There is self-interest.

  • Money. Creating derivatives has the ability to generate money (i.e., Blinkist) or build an audience (i.e., Four Minute Books).

  • Learning. With the Explanation Effect, one of the best ways to learn faster is to actually teach what you learn to others. By creating derivatives for themselves, readers turn into teachers and therefore, learn faster.

More so, AI-enabled derivatives will help the learning process of readers on multiple levels:

• Reading: Three things make reading hard. It takes time. It is cognitively taxing. Many parts of books aren’t relevant. AI derivatives enable you to get personalized summaries that are interesting and match your learning style.
  

• Understanding/Memory: AI derivatives enable readers to get cheat sheets, templates, interactive voice-enabled quizzes, and personalized coaching.
  

• Application/ Results: AI derivatives can design quick wins that readers can achieve immediately to easily apply a book’s ideas and get tangible results.

At first, these AI-enabled book derivatives may look like derivatives from the past: translations, journals, workbooks, daily reflections, planners, graphic novels, spin-offs for different ages and backgrounds, courses, study guides, and xtras (i.e., cheatsheets, glossary, templates, checklists, tutorials, resource list, bonus chapters, up-to-date case studies). These derivatives will be created in minutes rather than hundreds of hours with AI.

But, as time goes by, we will likely see new forms of derivatives emerge that we can’t even imagine now. For example, having a book coach is one new form of book derivative that will exist only because of AI. Another one is turning any book excerpt into a video in 15 minutes as I explain how to do in this tutorial. As an example of this, below is a video I created based on a quote that is read by an AI voice:

In the not-so-distant future, it will be possible to create dozens of these videos in minutes.

This opportunity is part of a larger long-term trend toward humanity becoming a remix culture, which futurist Kevin Kelly so eloquently contextualizes in his book, The Inevitable…

This Is Just The Start Of Remix Culture

Some current examples of remix culture that Kelly points out in his book are below:

• Fan fiction. Kelly says, “For instance, behind every bestselling book are legions of fans who write their own sequels using their favorite author’s characters in slightly altered worlds… They are unofficial—without the original authors’ cooperation or approval—and may mix elements from more than one book or author. Their chief audience is other avid fans. One fanfic archive lists 1.5 million fan-created works to date.”
  

• Shortform videos. And, of course, with TikTok, we see remixes like people reacting to a video clip with a 30-second soundtrack in the background.
  

• Animated gifs/memes. Photos of cultural moments or 1-2 second scenes from movies are remixed into content.

Extrapolating the trend, Kelly says:

These examples can only hint at the outburst and sheer frenzy of new forms appearing in the coming decades. Take any one of these genres and multiply it. Then marry and crossbreed them. We can see the nascent outlines of the new ones that might emerge.

With our fingers we will drag objects out of films and remix them into our own photos. A click of our phone camera will capture a landscape, then display its history in words, which we can use to annotate the image. Text, sound, motion will continue to merge.

With the coming new tools we’ll be able to create our visions on demand. It will take only a few seconds to generate a believable image of a turquoise rose, glistening with dew, poised in a trim golden vase—perhaps even faster than we could write these words. And that is just the opening scene.

The supreme fungibility of digital bits allows forms to morph easily, to mutate and hybridize. The quick flow of bits permits one program to emulate another. To simulate another form is a native function of digital media. There’s no retreat from this multiplicity. The number of media choices will only increase. The variety of genres and subgenres will continue to explode. Sure, some will rise in popularity while others wane, but few will disappear entirely. There will still be opera lovers a century from now. But there will be a billion video game fans and a hundred million virtual reality worlds.

The accelerating fluidity of bits will continue to overtake media for the next 30 years, furthering a great remixing.

Article Summary

As we come to an end here, let’s summarize…

• Books are one of the best ways to learn

• But they have problems

• These problems can be solved by AI

• AI enables new ways for us to read, learn from, evolve, and apply the ideas in books

• AI is good enough to do this now, and it’s getting better faster than any other technology in history

• AI-powered book derivatives present a new and powerful way to learn faster and earn income on the side

If you’re sold on the idea of AI-enabled book derivatives, the question becomes…

How do you capitalize on it as a reader and learner now?

That’s what the rest of my posts this week are about...

PREVIEW OF PAID SUBSCRIBER BONUSES

As a reminder, below are the contents I will be sending out to paid subscribers this week:

• Tutorial on how to create your own GPTs so you can use AI to learn faster and make more money.

• Breakdown of the 5 BookGPTs. This includes the Personalized Version, Research Brief, Thinking Brief, Action Brief, and Coach. For each of these I will give an overview of why each part of it is important and how to use those parts to create value in your life.

• Full access to my own suite BookGPTs (including the prompts) so you can use it and get inspiration for your own bot. Understanding OpenAI’s GPTs is critical to Augmented Reading.

• Q&A in the comments so you can ask me a question if you run into a challenge creating your bot.

And a special live masterclass on Thursday…

• Access to a BookGPT Q&A call this Thursday at 1-2pm EST. I will walk you through how to use and customize the BookGPTs. This will be the first live class for subscribers, so I’m very excited.

Bottom line, if you’re a paid subscriber, by the end of this week, you will walk away with all of my BookGPT prompts, a step-by-step tutorial on how to put them to work, Q&A in the comments of these posts, and live support from me on a Zoom call this Thursday.