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Comment by exe34 | Hacker News Reader

> Read a book

I wanted to say something flippant, but dang with the halo on my shoulder urges me otherwise.

so here goes: books can also full of filler crap and useless and outright wrong material. just because it's a different medium doesn't make it any better for wasting time. in fact, a bad book can waste weeks of your life whereas a bad video on YouTube could waste about 10 minutes.

ultimately I approve of any tools that allow one to extract the information that they are after without paying the cost of giving more attention to somebody than they've earned.

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Being a different medium does in fact make it much better for wasting time. Skipping a paragraph in a book takes 100 milliseconds. Referring back to a previous paragraph to understand a seeming contradiction does too. Pausing a book requires no effort, and no effort to return to the place where you were. Books can be excerpted and quoted, not just in other books, but also in conversation or in videos, in a way that videos just can't. (Talking-head filler scripts can be quoted that way, but the video can only be quoted in video or still images.) Errata sheets, errata websites, and later editions of books can correct errors in earlier editions. Books are much smaller and therefore easier to archive than videos, making them less likely to get lost.

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death is an extended and very persuasive reflection on precisely this difference in the tendencies of these two media, although particularly attuned to the form of video that was popular at the time, TV, which had commercials and didn't even have pause and rewind.

somehow I doubt that the person I was replying to would consider ebooks as a book.

videos can be viewed in double speed, and they can be rewound. they can be watched over and over if needed. they can describe/demonstrate information in ways that books can only project into 2 dimensions. a picture is worth a thousand words - well imagine 24 of those per second.

certainly with STEM subjects, nothing beats a good animation.

even for things like history/geography, I find animations and progressive disclosure to be much more engaging and easier to remember than dry words on a page.

Books at least go through a minimal amount of vetting before they are published, and there are meaningful differences between forms of media. As McLuhan wrote: "The medium is the message".

Lol, no they don't.

If you have a pdf with enough words in it, you can go from that to a published paperback on Amazon in 15 minutes.

Those aren't books. They're printed blogs you pay for.

Every book can be published as a pdf. That doesn't mean that every pdf is a book.

> Those aren't books. They're printed blogs you pay for.

If you are going to make an outlandish claim like this, at least try to post some criteria to defend. Not doing so has led to you not realizing that you can't without also excluding works of classical literature like Sense & Sensibility (which was self-published by Jane Austin).

There's also more direct problems with the arbitary line you are trying to draw, like best-selling book The Martian, which was originally published as a blog, then self-published as an e-book, then officially published as a book by a major publisher.

1. Some blogs are better than most books.

2. Some carefully-written ebooks now are self-published, and I don't care if their cover design and promotion campaign aren't as professional.

What a textbook (sorry, printed blog) example of a No True Scotsman.

No true Scottsman!

Actually its implication: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication

Maybe in the 1900s. Not any more

so if they're good, they're books. if not, they're not _really_ books.

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