The Master Switch by Tim Wu
Published 2010 · 431 pages · 100,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Business & Self-Help, History, Media & Technology, Nonfiction
How hard is The Master Switch to read?
The Master Switch scores 27 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Legal, economic, and technological terminology.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- Historical patterns used to build a theoretical framework.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with corporate history and legal analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Chronological within each industry. Thesis-driven.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- The Cycle as organizing concept.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Controlled irony in showing how openness repeatedly dies.
- Resolution withholding: 18 out of 100
- The internet's fate remains unresolved.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Four industry histories converging on one thesis.
How The Master Switch is regarded
The Master Switch holds a literary regard score of 46 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.