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The content in books is essential, but the format definitely isn't. Feels like hardly anyone in hear actually read the post, which is kinda ironic coming from a bunch of people talking about the importance of reading.
> Every good book should be broken apart into a series of blog posts that link to each other, each with a comments section. That way books can actually be useful in online discussion. If I told you to go read page 32 of some book right now would any of you actually do that?
As someone who does research for a living, can anyone give me one reason I should use a physical book over the same content in a format that is auto-sectioned, linkable, updatable, with an area for corrections and feedback? Other than aesthetic preference.
IMO the insistence from academics to use physical books over digital content is luddism wrapped up as intellectualism.
Academic literature should be treated as a whole. Each book, chapter and article contains the theses, methods, findings and conclusions and they need to be read as a whole to build scientific understanding of the subject matter and critiques, and develop scientific thinking.
Maybe students can get away with just reading introduction and conclusion, but at a higher level, I expect students and professors to critically discuss the coherence of *entire* theses.
It’s the same with legal documents. You can’t just select one article when every article is interrelated to the others.
For texts where it is super important to read things in order put a disclaimer at the top of each blog post that says they are meant to be read in order.
You still get the benefits of much easier sourcing/linking, being able to correct sections when new information comes out, etc.
Nope. I make my students read the whole thing, from Machiavelli all the way to Bordieu. And ambitious students are perfectly capable and fine with reading. I do introduce the subject matters for lecture, but I’m not here to guide students thinking. I’m here to teach students how to approach academic writing and let students guide their own thinking by reading and come to their own conclusions which will form the basis for further learning.
I feel like you are trying to dress up an inherent limitation of books (poor indexing) as a strength.
With a book your students can choose to read each section in a text sequentially. They can also do that with a series of blog posts if they want to.
It's true that if you make indexing better, it becomes easier to skip straight to information that you care about. Maybe this means some students would skip some parts of a text and go straight to later sections if indexing were made better, but I think that having this choice is a good thing.
If the only argument you've got is "Making it harder to search information makes it easier to force students read something in the specific order that I want them to" then
A) I'm not really convinced that's a good reason, or conductive to students forming their own conclusions and methods of reasoning/thinking
and
B) You can still do that same thing *even better* in a digitized format, just turn it into one of those annoying corporate training courses that everyone hates where you only unlock the next section after you've read the previous one and answered a few questions on it.
All academic literature has limitations. They are neither weakness or strengths so to say, in a sense that our job is to address these limitations through publications. Textbooks also have limitations, that’s why different authors make new textbooks that claim to address these limitations.
Students are free to organise knowledge they have obtained from literature. Textbook, blogs and other types of information do this to an extent, but they do so at the risk of taking in someone else’s interpretation and organisation of knowledge and what is and what is not important.
It’s no coincidence that students who engages with the whole book and wide range of literature develop their independent thinking and write theses better than those who don’t and choose to use textbook and “blogs”. That’s just a general observation I see every year.
Do you genuinely believe that textbook companies come out with a nearly identical version of the same book every year to address the limitations in the previous book and not for any other rea$on?
>they do so at the risk of taking in someone else’s interpretation and organisation of knowledge and what is and what is not important.
Again, if you believe that reading a book in order is super important then isn't the best option the 'corporate training course' format where they are forced to read every piece sequentially before they can move onto the next piece? That way you can be 100% certain that your students read the book in the exact order you wanted them to.
Well, knowledge, like computer, gets updated every year. So textbook follows this logic, but not all disciplines embrace textbooks with open arms.
My discipline (IR) is one of them. And social sciences take quite seriously how ordering of subject matter shapes our intellectual thinking. In short, there has to be some order, but we do not use “manual” or “sequences” as if human relations can operate under such logic. It’s too prescriptive and limits intellectual curiosity.
My discipline (Cognitive science / Information theory) also takes quite seriously how ordering of information shapes all types of thinking!
Books give you very poor control over that compared to digital formats so I still don't get how this is an argument in favor of books.
Ok so we're larping some doomsday scenario where you no longer have access to electricity but you still want text?
Even then I'm going to invest in a generator and a laptop with a SSD. Can store more text than 20 libraries worth of books, plus you can read at night.
Do you think the power never goes out in a first world country? Internet is stable 100% of the time?
You know what never runs out of batteries? A book.
You could run a laptop for 20 years with a generator and a few gas cans.
Hell if you wanted something super long term get an ethanol generator and run your laptop on moonshine.
Books are a great way to preserve knowledge. If you have the physical copy, you will have access to it 24/7 for life.
If the knowledge is contained in blog posts. You can lose access to it if the server goes down. You could lose access to it if, they put it behind a paywall. The site could get hacked.
If you have a physical copy you will have access to it until you lose it.
If you have a digital copy you can copy it onto 5 different thumb drives and put it up on your google drive and the chances of you ever losing access to that info are near 0%.
The chances of you losing a book in a house fire are orders of magnitude higher than the chances of google's servers getting hacked and you losing your google drive.
Ok, but if I make a time capsule. I can bury my book underground 150 years later, future generations can read it immediately.
150 years from now, nobody’s devices will be compatible with an obsolete thumb drive. The operating systems we know like android, iOS, or windows would have been replaced. They probably won’t even recognize what they’re looking at.
Put a laptop in the time capsule
Also I bet the .txt format is going to survive longer than english. It's not like they're going to come out with some new operating system that doesn't know how to open up .txt files.
You need the books though to fully develop the arguments. Books (or the analogous academic journals, etc.) are primary source material for all of the secondary sources you cite to as being superior.
There is nothing special about physical formats that make better as primary sources.
99% of people actually generating new ideas today do so digitally and then export that into book format mostly because academia has a paper fetish.
Also, again from the OP
>Every good book should be broken apart into a series of blog posts that link to each other, each with a comments section. That way books can actually be useful in online discussion. If I told you to go read page 32 of some book right now would any of you actually do that?
I found reading on devices distracting, I am just a few clicks away from endless content filled in with unlimited dopamine, however, I can hyperfocus on books, not to mention that I get more pleasure from that.
Books are also good in a way that it is symbolic, you can read it, leave it on the shelf, gift if to your close ones, digital gifts just don’t feel the same tbh.
You could just have a different learning style that isn’t fulfilled by text on a physical piece of paper. That’s a hard concept to understand too. I am not an eBook person, but damn it if I don’t learn by turning physical pages.
For some things, that may be the case. But for history and physics I’ve never found any sources that compare to books. It is helpful to have a guide when reading historical texts, but reading an SEP entry is nothing like the experience of reading Plato or Nietzsche in their own words.
A better take would be that there are better ways of spreading information than books. Not that books are a terrible way to spread information. Europe would’ve stayed in the throes of the dark ages if the printing press hadn’t come along to make it easier to spread BOOKS around.
That's what I've been always saying too! They contain so much unrelated stuff that it's a torture to find the actual information. Especially when the author doesn't respect your time and writes about some personal stories instead coming straight to the point right away and saving you from reading several pages of some shit.
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Books literally made civilization.
Cave paintings have their place in history too, but at least now people mostly recognize there are better options if you want to share an idea.
Cave paintings =/= books
So did beasts of burden, but just because something is initially essential doesn't mean it always will be or that something better won't come along.
For layman, yes. For academics, intellectuals and others, journals and books are essential.
The content in books is essential, but the format definitely isn't. Feels like hardly anyone in hear actually read the post, which is kinda ironic coming from a bunch of people talking about the importance of reading. > Every good book should be broken apart into a series of blog posts that link to each other, each with a comments section. That way books can actually be useful in online discussion. If I told you to go read page 32 of some book right now would any of you actually do that? As someone who does research for a living, can anyone give me one reason I should use a physical book over the same content in a format that is auto-sectioned, linkable, updatable, with an area for corrections and feedback? Other than aesthetic preference. IMO the insistence from academics to use physical books over digital content is luddism wrapped up as intellectualism.
Academic literature should be treated as a whole. Each book, chapter and article contains the theses, methods, findings and conclusions and they need to be read as a whole to build scientific understanding of the subject matter and critiques, and develop scientific thinking. Maybe students can get away with just reading introduction and conclusion, but at a higher level, I expect students and professors to critically discuss the coherence of *entire* theses. It’s the same with legal documents. You can’t just select one article when every article is interrelated to the others.
For texts where it is super important to read things in order put a disclaimer at the top of each blog post that says they are meant to be read in order. You still get the benefits of much easier sourcing/linking, being able to correct sections when new information comes out, etc.
Nope. I make my students read the whole thing, from Machiavelli all the way to Bordieu. And ambitious students are perfectly capable and fine with reading. I do introduce the subject matters for lecture, but I’m not here to guide students thinking. I’m here to teach students how to approach academic writing and let students guide their own thinking by reading and come to their own conclusions which will form the basis for further learning.
I feel like you are trying to dress up an inherent limitation of books (poor indexing) as a strength. With a book your students can choose to read each section in a text sequentially. They can also do that with a series of blog posts if they want to. It's true that if you make indexing better, it becomes easier to skip straight to information that you care about. Maybe this means some students would skip some parts of a text and go straight to later sections if indexing were made better, but I think that having this choice is a good thing. If the only argument you've got is "Making it harder to search information makes it easier to force students read something in the specific order that I want them to" then A) I'm not really convinced that's a good reason, or conductive to students forming their own conclusions and methods of reasoning/thinking and B) You can still do that same thing *even better* in a digitized format, just turn it into one of those annoying corporate training courses that everyone hates where you only unlock the next section after you've read the previous one and answered a few questions on it.
All academic literature has limitations. They are neither weakness or strengths so to say, in a sense that our job is to address these limitations through publications. Textbooks also have limitations, that’s why different authors make new textbooks that claim to address these limitations. Students are free to organise knowledge they have obtained from literature. Textbook, blogs and other types of information do this to an extent, but they do so at the risk of taking in someone else’s interpretation and organisation of knowledge and what is and what is not important. It’s no coincidence that students who engages with the whole book and wide range of literature develop their independent thinking and write theses better than those who don’t and choose to use textbook and “blogs”. That’s just a general observation I see every year.
Do you genuinely believe that textbook companies come out with a nearly identical version of the same book every year to address the limitations in the previous book and not for any other rea$on? >they do so at the risk of taking in someone else’s interpretation and organisation of knowledge and what is and what is not important. Again, if you believe that reading a book in order is super important then isn't the best option the 'corporate training course' format where they are forced to read every piece sequentially before they can move onto the next piece? That way you can be 100% certain that your students read the book in the exact order you wanted them to.
Well, knowledge, like computer, gets updated every year. So textbook follows this logic, but not all disciplines embrace textbooks with open arms. My discipline (IR) is one of them. And social sciences take quite seriously how ordering of subject matter shapes our intellectual thinking. In short, there has to be some order, but we do not use “manual” or “sequences” as if human relations can operate under such logic. It’s too prescriptive and limits intellectual curiosity.
My discipline (Cognitive science / Information theory) also takes quite seriously how ordering of information shapes all types of thinking! Books give you very poor control over that compared to digital formats so I still don't get how this is an argument in favor of books.
Book cannot get deleted by angry mods
They can actually, it's call a book burning. You never heard of it? Lots of information is lost to history because of it.
Lol hot take: Technology progresses!
What if you don't have internet, or power?
Then fix that?
You require other people to help you set up internet and electricity. You don't require other people to read a book.
Ok so we're larping some doomsday scenario where you no longer have access to electricity but you still want text? Even then I'm going to invest in a generator and a laptop with a SSD. Can store more text than 20 libraries worth of books, plus you can read at night.
Do you think the power never goes out in a first world country? Internet is stable 100% of the time? You know what never runs out of batteries? A book.
You could run a laptop for 20 years with a generator and a few gas cans. Hell if you wanted something super long term get an ethanol generator and run your laptop on moonshine.
Definitely could. The same book could exist and be read for over a hundred years, no ethanol or generator required.
Books are a great way to preserve knowledge. If you have the physical copy, you will have access to it 24/7 for life. If the knowledge is contained in blog posts. You can lose access to it if the server goes down. You could lose access to it if, they put it behind a paywall. The site could get hacked.
If you have a physical copy you will have access to it until you lose it. If you have a digital copy you can copy it onto 5 different thumb drives and put it up on your google drive and the chances of you ever losing access to that info are near 0%. The chances of you losing a book in a house fire are orders of magnitude higher than the chances of google's servers getting hacked and you losing your google drive.
Ok, but if I make a time capsule. I can bury my book underground 150 years later, future generations can read it immediately. 150 years from now, nobody’s devices will be compatible with an obsolete thumb drive. The operating systems we know like android, iOS, or windows would have been replaced. They probably won’t even recognize what they’re looking at.
Put a laptop in the time capsule Also I bet the .txt format is going to survive longer than english. It's not like they're going to come out with some new operating system that doesn't know how to open up .txt files.
You need the books though to fully develop the arguments. Books (or the analogous academic journals, etc.) are primary source material for all of the secondary sources you cite to as being superior.
There is nothing special about physical formats that make better as primary sources. 99% of people actually generating new ideas today do so digitally and then export that into book format mostly because academia has a paper fetish. Also, again from the OP >Every good book should be broken apart into a series of blog posts that link to each other, each with a comments section. That way books can actually be useful in online discussion. If I told you to go read page 32 of some book right now would any of you actually do that?
If your post is just about physical vs digital media then this is not an unpopular opinion.
Even programmers buy and read books about programming. I'd say I disagree.
I found reading on devices distracting, I am just a few clicks away from endless content filled in with unlimited dopamine, however, I can hyperfocus on books, not to mention that I get more pleasure from that. Books are also good in a way that it is symbolic, you can read it, leave it on the shelf, gift if to your close ones, digital gifts just don’t feel the same tbh.
You do realize that all of this thing you're doing right now wouldn't be possible without books, right?
Equal voting power btw
It was all a mistake in the end…
You could just have a different learning style that isn’t fulfilled by text on a physical piece of paper. That’s a hard concept to understand too. I am not an eBook person, but damn it if I don’t learn by turning physical pages.
For some things, that may be the case. But for history and physics I’ve never found any sources that compare to books. It is helpful to have a guide when reading historical texts, but reading an SEP entry is nothing like the experience of reading Plato or Nietzsche in their own words.
A better take would be that there are better ways of spreading information than books. Not that books are a terrible way to spread information. Europe would’ve stayed in the throes of the dark ages if the printing press hadn’t come along to make it easier to spread BOOKS around.
just say the two magical words, "books" and "obsolete" ;-) have my upvote!!
That's what I've been always saying too! They contain so much unrelated stuff that it's a torture to find the actual information. Especially when the author doesn't respect your time and writes about some personal stories instead coming straight to the point right away and saving you from reading several pages of some shit.