As someone who was a student over a decade ago, I'd lose my fucking mind if I had to use physical books. There was simply not enough time to go get books off the shelf and complete all my assignments. Everything was done digitally, I can't think of a single exception in college.

I once turned in a math exam written using LaTeX and the professor initially declined to grade it. I did concede that I hadn't followed the directions (handwritten answers only), but the professor did eventually grade it.

Huh what major were you? As a math major we used exclusively physical books and it was fine. There was one time that the professor wanted us to use a theorem in a homework assignment from a book he neglected to assign to us for the class. The entire class collaborated on that problem set and emailed him for help, and he admitted he'd made a mistake and lent us a copy of the book. That was probably the biggest can't-use-the-internet mishap, but then again the rest of that set still took us about 24 hours to solve including with the TA's help and the professor ended up canceling the last homework out of 5 total because the 4th one was too hard. That was a great class.

> I once turned in a math exam written using LaTeX and the professor initially declined to grade it.

This is just weird though. I used LaTeX for the majority of my homeworks and also exams. It was about an even split between LaTeX and handwriting for math people iirc.

We used digital textbooks, in my entire computer science curriculum, we were never forced to use a physical book. In the last few years, "renting" etextbooks from Amazon caught on. The only exception was a suggestion, not a requirement, to buy the ds algo book as a reference for the future. I can't imagine having to use a physical textbook, the find/control + f feature really speeds up learning.

By the time I graduated, 90% of my books were ebooks or pdfs the professor had samizdat'd from the publisher.

The other 10% were books the publisher only had physical prints of or which I could find pdf copies from other locales of.

> LaTeX

I submitted a lot of things done in LaTeX that professors hated grading for the sheer reason that I made them count words manually instead of letting them skim-count based on the number of words on a Word page. I eventually wrangled the `Geometry` and `mla.sty` packages into submission and even made my own custom version of Garamond that added an extra en-space to periods following a character followed by a space just to be boring.

I just made my template dump a word count and nobody seemed to care after awhile.

numerous of my classes had a syllabus that consisted of "buy eBook from XYZ otherwise you receive no credit for this course". At least one course required a book no longer in print or digital copy.

the specific exam I am referring to indicated hand written as a requirement. It's also unlikely that the prof. failing me would have survived the scrutiny of the administration.

> simply not enough time to go get books off the shelf and complete all my assignments

Why bother with books when it's so easy to fabricate?

I think you replied to the wrong comment

I was a student more like 20 years ago. I had a lot of physical books as well. There's different use cases.

If you are searching for a specific piece of information - digital all the way.

If you are trying to digest material in a linear fashion, I find a physical book works better for me. Less distractions.

I'd agree with this take. I love reading physical books to learn new subject areas. It's one of my favorite things to do period, as a hobby. Lie down in bed with a physical book & have someone tell you the most important things they learned in life, organized into chapters.

For research I think it's good to use a mix. You won't get good "unknown unknowns" if all you do is search for facts. Some reading of articles and books is good.

I agree on the less distractions part. But it's just a time thing. I can search 7 different books in the time it would take me to get one off a shelf and search it.

I've found that somewhat unexpectedly sometimes physical is faster for search.

With a physical book I might remember that the equation I'm looking for was near the bottom of a series of equations on the bottom half of a left hand page, and the right hand page had a particular graph, and this was somewhere in the third quarter of the book.

It is then just a matter of quickly fanning through that general region of the book to find it.

With digital I can do a digital search but it is hard to find search terms that don't return a ton of hits all through the book. As I read a digital book I don't get a sense of movement through it that I get from a physical book, so I'm less likely to be able to remember how far into the book what I seek should be.

Availability is also an issue. I wouldn't be too satisfied with having to drive 2 hours to a library in a different city because the two copies of a specific textbook had already been borrowed from the closest one. And before you ask, no, not all colleges have decent on-campus libraries. Some lend (the single and only copies of) books to professors for them to keep for ages.

I think the phrase "physical textbooks" was less of the "of the material world" definition of physcial but rather was implying "real, professionally published".

libgen.rs or Z-Library bridges the gap for most students by providing free digital versions of almost all physical textbooks. Thanks to these resources, requiring physical book citations would not be an onerous requirement at any point in the past ten years.

More than once I've had a professor "accidentally" leave a PDF copy of the textbook lying around somewhere, with the URL "accidentally" visible on the projector screen during a break.

Google Books excerpts are enough if you just need to mine citations. Write from Wikipedia or other informal sources—or from just a single book—then find your citations on Google Books by searching for specific info in your paper (you don't want to just cite Wikipedia's citations—some teachers and professors are wise to that). Cut my paper-writing time to less than half, if you factor in the time to go find books in the library. I love libgen, but search on Google Books can take you straight to the page you need. Give it a skim to make sure it's relevant, auto-generate the professor's preferred citation formatting somewhere, done. Works like a charm for light-duty make-work undergrad papers where reading multiple sources is kinda redundant because they're all gonna say basically the same stuff anyway.

So it was impossible for students 30 years ago to complete their assignments because they only had access to physical books? How did any of them graduate?

I was doing my undergrad during the same time period, and I always went with the physical book option when one existed.

I for some reason find it much quicker to read and find stuff in a physical book. I also hate reading on a screen (didn't have any e ink device).

ChatGPT can cite physical textbooks though

It can also give me quotes from Martians, but that doesn't mean Martians or what they or the average Venusian had to say on a topic true.

It can certainly make up things that look like citations. It definitely cannot produce a series of valid inline citations for specific quotes, rephrasings, or statistics.

It sometimes can if it has those books in it's training set. But it won't tell you it doesn't know, it will hallucinate a citation that doesn't exist.

> But it won't tell you it doesn't know, it will hallucinate a citation that doesn't exist.

Maybe but I've had ChatGPT tell me it doesn't know many things.

GPT-4 with browsing-mode enabled (beta) does present citations to real sources, with clickable links.

Why do you think it can't do that?