No more procrastination—get motivated to read even the most boring textbook with this publication technique that mixes a textbook with lurid page-turning fiction!

The Issue:

It can be difficult to get motivated to read a textbook or dry historical tome. It’s much easier to read an action-filled story that features murder and intrigue!

Proposal:

In order to motivate a person to read a boring textbook, we will create a new kind of “hybrid” book: instead of printing a separate textbook and page-turning thriller, we will print a single book in which odd pages are from a compelling murder mystery and even pages are from a textbook (Figure 1).

***Fig. 1:*** This hybrid textbook is printed with alternating pages from two sources: a gripping page-turner and a boring-but-educational textbook. A reader who wants to solve the MURDERS OF SKELETON BAY will also need to flip through the “introduction to electromagnetism” pages.

Conclusion:

Often, the hardest part of doing a task is just starting it. By making it more appealing to pick up the book in the first place, we increase the chances that the reader will ALSO slog through the pages of the associated textbook.

PROS: Reduces procrastination by making it more appealing to start reading an uncompelling book.

CONS: Some editing might be required: if we suppose that it takes the same amount of time to understand one textbook page as thirty mystery novel pages, we would probably need to reduce the amount of material on each textbook page to 1/30th of its previous amount. Or make the murder mystery prose 30 times more dense and incomprehensible.