Bill Gates: Textbooks are becoming obsolete

I greatly prefer text to video and/or interactive elements for learning.

The pacing of video content tends to be much slower than I'm capable of taking in, so watching lectures becomes a frustrating exercise. I usually watch the videos at 1.5 speed or just read the transcript, if it's available. And interactive elements are usually so clumsy to use that they become worthless.

I also don't want my learning materials spying on me and reporting back about my progress. That's just creepy, and is one more step in the march towards making the world a particularly dreary cyberpunk dystopia.

I think the problem is that most textbooks these days are hot garbage - instead of building a professional library, you end up with irrelevant dead weights. I have textbooks from back at University which I still refer to today (data structures and similar topics), but most modern textbooks seem to really focus in on particular technologies and frameworks, which become useless in just a few short years.

I find textbooks painful, but I also think I grow the most when reading them. This is because textbooks are organized, the material often goes into more depth than a blog post, and most importantly for me, I can be away from electronic distractions.

May be, but Textbooks provide a single purpose usage that doesn't distract you in ways in the back of you mind you know what these iPad could do ( Gaming, Youtube ) etc.....

The title is somewhat misrepresenting. Textbooks as teaching means are becoming obsolete.

Textbooks will always be relevant as long as states use standardized testing.