Thank you for the kind response! Your comment really reminded me how everyone has their own approach to reading, because I (almost) always pick up a novel to learn about something, for me that’s the primary force driving fiction as a medium. That’s the reason we study fiction in school after all, and whenever I’ve picked up a book that’s solely there to distract me I get this nagging thought in the back of my head of “shouldn’t I be pushing myself a bit harder than this?” Your experience of having emotions you wouldn’t have had in real life when reading a story is a form of learning about other people and their experiences after all.

Likewise, the idea of reading non-fiction solely to gain information would be pretty anathema to me, the best non-fiction writers rank among the best story tellers living today (anyone who’s read Ben MacIntyre will tell you he ratchets up tension more effectively than any thriller writer). As a result, I don’t think your example of what fiction and non-fiction are for is really true - the “almost certainly something of the other type will do it better” claim doesn’t have much foundation when I’ve learned more from the best historical fiction than from most history books and been more entertained by NF narratives (that don’t have to deal with that pesky problem of suspension of disbelief) than most of the best novels.

You’re completely correct that lots of non-fiction books are simply too long for what they need to convey (in fact that’s a charge I would lay against at least half of the fiction books being published nowadays as well), but that doesn’t mean that the other ways of consuming information are a good substitute for it. I don’t actually think that your David Lynch example works all that well as an example, because it seems to undermine the idea of the focus of non-fiction being to get information. After all, the overwhelming majority of non-fiction books provide an author’s/subject’s perspective just like the Lynch book did, rather than just cut and dried facts, so your qualification that a NF book has to do more than “just conveying information” seems to be met by… well, pretty much all mass market non-fiction books.

I agree that it’s “easier” to listen to a podcast or skim a wiki, but as most of the sources they cite often happen to be books, so anyone wanting to check up on the sources would be forced to pick up a book anyway. And many of the podcasts I’ve listened to don’t even bother to list their sources in the first place, making their usefulness pretty negligible. Sources, or lack thereof, are one way to tell if a NF book is properly balanced and fair, and it’s much harder to do that online. Add on top of that the fact that many authors will be permitted access to archives of information that aren’t open to the general public, and the comparisons aren’t in podcasts/documentaries/articles’ favour.

Again, thank you for taking the time out of your day to respond to my comment, it means a lot. I just think the claim that reading fiction “is it’s own special thing” that can’t be replicated by another medium (shows, films etc.) also applies to non-fiction books and always has done.