The key sentence in this post is when the author says that to understand something, you must actively engage with it. Part of me thinks that saying books don’t work is a bit like saying, say, barbells don’t work. Like barbells, books are passive objects, so expecting them to “work” seems unreasonable. But another part of me agrees that barbells can be designed to be more or less compatible with how human beings grasp and lift them to build strength, and so can books. Having re-read recently “How to Take Smart Notes”, which is all about using the Zettelkasten method to make reading a very diligent and thorough process that ends with every insight from a reading source integrated into your own body of explicit thought outside your brain, another part of me thinks books are fine, and it’s us not putting in the effort to integrate what we read int our existing thoughts that’s the issue. I did not see that book, or books like it such as Novak’s “Learning How To Learn” mentioned, but things like concept maps, activbely created and interactively shared, provide another modality I’ve found very useful for many years. Overall I think it’s not a reasonable expectation for us to remember everything we read in our minds; we need an integrated exocortex, also in writing, that captures what we remember explicitly.
Very thought inspiring. I would also argue that maybe it's not the form (the books) what don't work, but us as humans approaching the act of learning. Maybe we would indeed find book as great learning artifats if we approached them and learning in a proper and structured way (taking notes, reading carefully, re-reading complex paragraphs, trying to anticipate the answer to questions introduced by the book).