I love reading as much as anyone, and probably finish on average, 100 books a year, but - I’ve gradually become skeptical of the idea that books are an ideal format for acquiring and retaining knowledge. I’ve written a few little comments about this in the past [1] but I’ve been meaning to explore the idea further. I originally began thinking this when I realized I could only remember a handful of details from books I had spent hours reading.

The short version is this: there’s nothing inherent about the format of a book that makes it ideal for learning. It is mostly a historical consequence of the fact that scratching symbols onto stone or paper, then replicating that paper/stone is easier to develop than recording and playing back audio or video. Human beings spent thousands of years using languages that were purely spoken ones, and writing is a fairly recent thing historically speaking.

If somehow it became possible to record and play back spoken language thousands of years ago, writing might have never become a widespread thing at all. Even today, speech is how the vast majority of the world uses language. Let’s not forget how influential the book form has been on thought, from the Bible to the Quran, etc.

And so if you brush away the mystique and legacy of books and think about what an ideal learning format would be, I think it would be quite different from a book. Probably it would incorporate audiovisuals, spaced repetition, and some form of storytelling.

All of this is about reading for information, not for pleasure. But I don’t primarily read fiction for information in the first place.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940944, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38095507, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39521964