Blinkist is a company that produces summaries of books. You can read these summaries instead of buying and reading the full book. This saves you time and energy.
Shortform does something similar. (Personally, I've found the quality of the Shortform summaries much better than Blinkist - which, I thought, were often pretty bad/inaccurate.)
Most of the books on these platforms seem to be management, self-help and popular science titles.
It would be cool if someone could create a service which does similar (super-high-quality) summaries for key EA-relevant texts.
Ali Ladak of the Sentience Institute has produced something like this, for books related to consciousness/digital minds, which I found super useful.
It would also be super cool to have the option of doing this on demand. E.g., I come across a book that I'd like to read. I then send a request/instruction to the 'summariser' to produce a high-quality summary of the key ideas in the book.
It seems like it would be possible to do this on a paid-for model. Or on a philanthropically-funded model.
Maybe someone would like to implement this idea?!
I've actually thought of this type of thing. I read a lot, and it would be nice to have some sort of extrinsic motivation to nudge me to type up short summaries of the books I read. I don't think I am a particularly skilled writer, but I don't think it would be too hard to create some first drafts of summaries of 5-10 EA relevant books, and then other people could add in their own edits over time.
Here is a (very simple) start. Think of this as a minimum viable product.