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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

> have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years

That means very little, history is littered with awful standards used for centuries, there is no magic that translates longevity into greatness

> They have few technical problems

Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ...

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Well, books continue to work for a lot of people (including myself). Every time I read a book about a topic, I come away with deeper and more contextual knowledge than if I just piece together scraps of information from badly written blog posts and overly technical documentation - and that's only for programming stuff, for history etc. books tend to be even more valuable.

> Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ...

Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages. And also, e-books and PDFs exist, for the people that prefer them.

As for the "tailoring to a specific reader" and "tracking understanding", that's a problem for any learning resource, as people are incredibly varied. Maybe in certain situations, learning resources exist that are extremely adaptable, but I've rarely seen that. In general, for a given topic one should check out different books until one finds one that is well-suited, skip sections that are obvious, consult other sources where one remains confused, do exercises if the book has them, etc.

Books being hard to edit and/or collaborate on could maybe (if it's even true) be a problem for authors, but why does it matter for readers?

The one thing that I do consider true is that you can't do extremely fancy visualisations in a book. But there's no problem with supplementing a book with e.g. a website where you can find interactive visualisations, etc. (also: simply not every topic needs complex interactive visualisations).

Well, books also continue to fail a lot of people

> Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages.

All of that is true for physical books, if you're limited to tiny margins and can't easily find your margin scribbles later, then it's a format fail, you just continue to use the same flawed logic "done for ages = good"

> And also, e-books and PDFs exist, for the people that prefer them.

Which mostly repeat the paper medium, so fail to solve most of those issues

> As for the "tailoring to a specific reader" and "tracking understanding", that's a problem for any learning resource, as people are incredibly varied.

Yet it's especially a problem with books

> In general, for a given topic one should check out different books

In general one should not limit oneself to books, even for just a starting point

> Books being hard to edit and/or collaborate on could maybe (if it's even true) be a problem for authors, but why does it matter for readers?

For example, to remove "sections that are obvious", add "exercises", find reference to "other sources", see explanations from other readers etc.

> there's no problem with supplementing a book with e.g. a website where you can find interactive visualisations, etc.

The problem is it's a big limitation of the format, and you can't integrate it well if you have to switch back and forth

> also: simply not every topic needs complex interactive visualisations

Which topic do you think can't benefit from one?

> Well, books also continue to fail a lot of people

Yes, because learning is hard. A book is not a guarantee that you'll learn something - but neither is any other sort of resource.

The thesis of this discussion is that "books don't work" and that's blatantly false. Maybe there's certain people for whom they really "don't work", but as a general statement, it's false.

> Which topic do you think can't benefit from one?

I don't need fancy data visualisation if I read up on the history of the Roman Empire, for example. Or if I want to read Plato. Or to understand axiomatic set theory.

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I'll just put it differently: if you prefer other kinds of resources and they work for you - great. But to say "books don't work" just means that you artificially limit the things you learn. Writing books is comparatively easy (if you're an expert in the area). Doing fancy interactive experiences etc. requires much more time, skill, knowledge etc. - there's probably 3 to 4 orders of magnitude more stuff that has been written in books than has been made available through other means, so saying "books suck" means just locking yourself out of a lot of stuff.

You're wrong re the thesis: this discussion is about the limitations of the format the op claimed were "few", and those limitations are what help fail people, you can't ignore it with a "learning is hard" mantra, that's not relevant when the argument is that it's made hardER by the limitations

And of course just dumping your expert knowledge on the page is easier than creating an effective learning experience

Boomkarking a physical book is super easy and a lot more intuitive and easy to use than an eBook version.

Some books come with one or two strings built in that can be used. Mostly to track where you are in the book right now, and the other one for something you find important.

Then there are thousands of different bookmarks you can buy as many as you need.

You also have adhesive-colored tabs you can use to mark whatever you like.

You can also bend the top or bottom corner of a page, Or use scissors and remove the corner entirely.

Bookmarking technology for real life books is mature and easy to use.

Some books make it easy to write down here you are externally. Page Numbers, or like the Bible with several numeric markings that makes finding a quote fast and easy.

Books can come with indexes that make finding things easier. To browse through index entries can also provide interesting insight.

It is super easy to annotate. You can use a pencil and things can be erased if you desire. You can use pens You can use highlighters, You can use stickers, You can write the margins You can attach post it notes You can attach documents (pressed between the existing pages.

The way you do bookmark, highlight, and scribble can be of tremendous value for the next reader. (Or it can be flat out annoying).

It is also easy these days to take a photo of a page with your cellphone and do whatever you want. then you can if you so wish print and glue it in, or insert a page or whatever into the book.

A book can have very rich illustrations and graphics.

If you do need to reference rich media you can print a QR code in the relevant part of the book so people can quickly pull up the video or whatever there is a need for.

You're describing a bunch of variations is a primitive unsearchable design, there is no value in that sticky richness related to the issue I've described

How do you group all the bookmarks that are related to a given topic? Use a specific bookmark color? How do you then change the whole group? Or, physically go to every single bookmark and change it to a different color? How would you list all paragraphs you've bookmarked together (let's say you want to track a story of a given character interaction with another one)? How do you add longer custom text to the bookmarks? Physical ones don't have enough space for your questions that you'd later like to go back to to find answers to

I mean even in the most trivial case- using a string to track where you are: why is this even needed when a computer can do the tracking automatically? Also, that string only tracks 2 pages, not the exact point in text

Indexes are also not great, they're slow to use, usually incomplete (so any primitive full-text search would beat them), and uneditable by the reader, so don't reflect

"Take a picture" is a laughable suggestion, why would I also need to waste time to OCR "to do whatever I need" when I could start with a better format in the first place?

What is your favorite alternative medium?

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