Those who love fiction have their favourite authors and genre. Some don’t have any specific preference and will read anything that they can lay their hands on. We read fiction to get the feel of the character, to understand the plotline, to feel the emotions of the characters, to join the suspense ride with the author and any other myriad reasons. We read some authors for the conversation between the characters and we love some other authors for their lovely descriptive prose. So essentially you don’t skip much of the fiction book. Those of us who know where and how to skim the text do so for boring passages. But there is no fun in reading the summary of a fiction book. The soul and heart of the book get missed in a summary. Hearing the story of a movie is not the same as seeing the movie. Reading fiction is for the experience.
The same thing cannot be said of non-fiction books. We don’t really read non-fiction for the beauty of language, for plot lines or anything of that sort in general. We read them to get the gist of an idea, the new insights or nuggets of wisdom. This is true of the books on self, psychology, self-help, learning skills, management guides etc. Most of these books contain just a couple of good ideas but are padded with a lot of fluff. There is always a small book struggling to get out of the big one. Most salient contents of these books can be written in a couple of pages.
This is where the world of book summaries come to our aid. There are a lot of helpful folks in the world who read these books and summarize their contents for us in a few pages. These services are available in the paid category and free category too. When something good is available for free, why would we want to pay for it? Before shelling out money to buy a book in this genre it is a good idea to read the summary. If the summary is enough then no need to buy the book. But if the summary kindles your interest and you want to read in detail then you can buy the book.
Here are some of those generous folks who offer book summaries online for free.