The books I truly love, I've read at least three times, with pages full of highlights and notes. Re-reading a great book is worth more than reading the latest trends. Seneca wrote a bit about this nearly 2000 years ago:

Be careful, however, that there is no element of discursiveness and desultoriness about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind.

Also, these books mentioned, as all non-fiction books do, include a bibliography. If someone wants to learn more, they simply should read more.

We can’t expect any device, book or otherwise, to do the work for us. If someone is not getting what they want out of it, I would suggest that they work harder.

“I believe that learning at its best is the antithesis of comfort.” Ruth J. Simmons, 18th president of Brown University. [2]

[1] http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.htm...

[2] https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2001-02/01-...

Not that books are useless or you shouldn't read them.

"Books work, but they're not the complete solution" is a much better title, but then us as the audience don't need to read a multi-page Medium article type rant to know that.

To be honest, you could replace 'book' with 'video', 'article', 'podcast' or any other medium people learn from and the article could stand pretty much as is and give the same general point.

The whole article could probably be more effectively re-written with the focus on time and learning, using different media as well as books as an example and make the point stronger. By choosing books as a focus, the author loses the main point and doesn't really get to it until the end, making the article, as you and other commenters pointed out, ranty and a slog to read through.

I think part of the problem is that the author of TFA sorta "buried the lede" and didn't really get to the point until very near the end. I suspect a lot of people got bored and quit reading before that point. Honestly, I did, and it wasn't until my second reading that I got what he was saying near the end, which is admittedly a somewhat different take.

Specifically, the "premise of the article" being "I invested 15-20 hours reading this book and, boohoo, I’m not a subject matter expert on the book’s topic" is nowhere to be found in the article, at least by my reading. Or maybe it is actually there and I missed it?

I suppose the author of the article would help his/her case with examples of how you can improve on what can be communicated by a book, but I reckon that might actually be impossible.

It's both. The proposal is at the very, very end, after a boring, long-winded screed about how everything else doesn't work.

> the author gives a link to his proposal

I took a look. I don't see any significant difference between this and a traditional textbook.

I think he emails problem sets at appropriate times after you finish the book to ensure you remember everything.

I think people feel subconsciously guilty that they do not read more. It is thus easier to dismiss books than to acknowledge the fact that most attention spans have been reduced the the granularity of a comment thread. We are all victims to this. Reading a book takes more effort than it used to.

I fear that most people have already read the last book they will complete in their lifetime (not that completing a book is necessary in deriving value from it).

I agree with most of your points but not this one. The proliferation of audio books and text-to-speech (TTS) has made reading books easier than ever. Particularly TTS in my case; I can read an eBook visually for a few hours, then switch to TTS for a while to give my eyes a break, and in this way easily marathon books. Once you are accustomed to TTS you can turn the speed up very fast. I tune the speed on the fly to compensate for mental fatigue to maintain a consistent level of comprehension; when I'm 'in the groove' I can comfortably set TTS to around 750wpm. I can read visually faster than that, but only in a 'sprint', not with endurance. (I find that for finishing a book quick, it's better to be a tortoise than a hare.)

I read nonfiction and fiction like this. Math heavy texts aren't well suited for it, nor books with many charts and tables, but except for a few cases like that it's very adaptable. Modern TTS even handles weird names in fantasy novels surprisingly well.

Fortunately, they are far outnumbered by people who love books, buy them, read them, share them, put them on bookshelves, and would generally think this article is profoundly silly.

If you want to know what instantaneous knowledge transfer looks like you just have to look at how ideas commute via Twitter/Facebook memes, which is largely a reification of word-of-mouth.

On a certain level, actual learning requires active participation: you have to want to learn. Learning disrupts your entire world and that's kinda the point. The idea of frictionless learning seems fanciful.

You can say you're shortening the feedback look in a multimedia text, but the desire to learn in my experience starts very early in life and is a fragile thing to cultivate. The author is trying to pour water out of a sinking ship with a bucket. You want people to want to learn, get rid of common CORE with basically tells all the kids who don't have STEM proficiencies or can match pace with its demands, "good luck with life"

There are gigantic swathes of people, the people most in need, who'd already be daunted merely opening the author's marketed multimedia text they wrote at the sight of the math equation.

You're already introducing something terribly new and threatening, threatening to the sureness of the reader's ego, which, again, is why people learn easiest from toxic, context-less memes.

"Get explainers of insights from 3,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles. Free 7-day trial. It takes just 15 mins to read or listen to the key insights from bestselling nonfiction. Audio and Text. Insights in 15 minutes."

Personally I recoil in horror at their marketing as an "app for intellectuals". Genuinely, deep diving is frequently required. Summaries by their nature lack nuance.

I want to read the nuance. I want to give the author the chance to get their point across. I want to read all the footnotes, maybe lookup things in the bibliography.

I don't think anyone I know to be what I'd call an intellectual simply listens to summaries of books. It's sort of anti-intillectual to do that indeed.

That to me doesn't sound like someone complaining about not remembering what they read, but someone complaining that they can't backup the arguments that they now consider their own. Books aren't meant to transfer the author's knowledge to the reader they're meant to offer an abstraction of the author's knowledge to the reader.

The writer of this post has no trouble remembering the abstraction, but without more effort the abstraction cannot be backed up.

In order to really make knowledge your own you have to do serious work. You can't just read one book.

If we were in situation where many people rarely learn from books then conclusion would make sense. But authors examples are all fairly in same category - pop famous edutainment. Maybe selfish gene sux at teaching. But it is apparently good entertainment and did a lot to popularize that part of biology and evolution. It worked in that sense for many people.

Then again, of course, I'm sure that applies to plenty of people in the western hemisphere as well.

So, I think it could be argued that the term "western culture" is a misnomer in general, and maybe even a problematic one—but I don't think GP was out of line with common usage.

I wasn't trying to implicitly compare Western culture to some idealized other culture, I was trying to limit the scope of my critique based on my limited knowledge of the world.

So long as I am able, I will always try to find time to read something new. Especially from books. I can't be precise about this point, but I seriously believe that the kind of information that can be conveyed in a book, cannot be communicated any other way.

I think it's fair to discuss what can be gleaned from a single reading of a book, but there can never be any question of just how much can be communicated by a book, and how much can be learnt from one.

The advent of cinema, and even personal computing, has only served to show how essential a technology the written word is.

It's going to take a very radical piece of technology to improve on it. One that we probably won't see in our time.

A person must learn actively while reading:

- By taking notes

- By summarizing important/difficult to understand sections in their own words via writing

- By looking up and exploring alternative explanations of complex idea, and following the two aforementioned avenues towards solidifying one's understanding

Rinse & repeat.

Reading != Learning.

Reading is more of a casual perusal of knowledge, when one isn't actively engaged in the above 3 ways mentioned (or other strategies to absorb the knowledge presented in a book or other compendium of information)

Learning = actively engaging with subject matter with a strong intention to understand and even memorize when necessary.

I read about a similar concept few years ago. https://fs.blog/2013/06/the-antilibrary/