TED sometimes seems to me like a collection of sales pitches for books that take four to ten scientific papers about a topic and go on and on ... and on about i

TED sometimes seems to me like a collection of sales pitches for books that take four to ten scientific papers about a topic and go on and on ... and on about it. I liked this kind of book but now I give up on them after one or two chapters and read about the main ideas on Wikipedia. But ... there is a lot of good stuff on TED too like Bruce Schneier's talks.