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Comment by squaredot | Hacker News Reader

The content of a book is always more important than its form, but we cannot get to its content if not through its form. What I don't like here is the general Microsoft Word-like feeling of the book. What I like is the use of colors and layout that makes it easier to find definitions and other concepts.

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An expert shared, for free, a great and well-respected book in the mathematics community, a book that often makes top-n lists and is often the recommendation for starting off in topology. Yet.. the main complaint on HN is about the fonts, colors, and layout?

How anti-intellectual, sad and absurd.

This is probably how book reviews read in Idiocracy.

I see two sides of a same coin. Consumer of information, or maybe consumer in general, should be conscious about the quality being consumed is roughly determined by the expertise of producer and effort being put in. Hence the quality ladder is roughly book > blog > youtube video > social media posts > tiktok videos. OTOH, a producer should know their audience, and lower the entry barrier for their content to be consumed sometimes. That's also why, in my opinion, mostly used software are often not those with best qualities or features, but those with nice UIs, and good marketing money.

This is a book on topology. This is not a "consumer" product for people who are just browsing. Most readers will have a good chunk of a math or similar undergrad or are grad students. And you will likely spend at lest a few months mastering its material.

The writer knows their audience very well. People who want to learn topology. The kinds of people who have learned that you don't make a decision on a book based on colorful it is. Otherwise you will read a lot of trash.

In general. You can't be an expert in a field by choosing what you read based on how pretty it is. "Oh sorry, we didn't read the reference handbook for the plane we're flying because the fonts they used in the 70s were too ugly", "Yeah, I'm a heart surgeon but I only read papers in Times New Roman with at a minimum 4 colors".

This is pretty much the dumbest shallowest comment on a technical book I can possibly imagine. "The words are hard to evaluate. The fonts aren't great and but it's just about colorful enough. 5/10"

3B1B YouTube and Mathologer's PowerPoint -based YouTube are better than most books.

The important thing is that colors in a book should have more to do with content than markup.

OTOH it's still relatively common for interesting mathematical work to be put online as scans of handwritten slides...

it looks as though it's been done with latex, but a real nasty font and other formatting.

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