I went fully digital some years ago, gave away most of my printed books and bought ebooks only. Now I have my whole library in Calibre and on my Kindle. Why? Because I have my whole library with me. And I can download my highlights and process them. Into notes in Obsidian, that I can link to in my study notes.
Recently I started buying paper based books again. Man, I missed holding physical books in my hands. And I start to regret having gotten rid of my physical library. There were so many memories I had with most of these books. I remember their covers, and instantly my emotions , thoughts, feelings are triggered. I don’t have these emotions when I think of my digital books.
My spouse has books that she was gifted when she was a child. Still in our kids shelf. I cannot give her my digital books.
I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
Printed books are a physical experience. Something that allows me to attach thoughts, emotions, feelings to it. And they can become part of my life. Like a good friend.
And let's be honest, a good book collection is a great addition to a room, aesthetically. People tend not to talk about that aspect, I think they worry about being seen as pretentious showing off their books. But I think a book collection can be a great decoration, just as flowers or a painting can be.
And if you have family or friends over and one of them sees something they like, you can lend it to them there and then (if you are so inclined). Some of my earliest reading-related memories are being in an uncle's or neighbour's house and being fascinated by a book on a shelf that they kindly let me take home to read.
I actually made the opposite experience. Books nowadays have so many different format and colors, it’s really hard to make it esthetically pleasing, I have multiple walls full of books and they look like a mess, I dislike it.
Even if I could make it look nice, it would then be an intellectual mess, it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Actually, good question, how do you people organise your books? (Full disclosure, I’m messy)
I organize them by the color, either rainbow-style or from darker to brighter.
> it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Libraries solve this with the Dewey Decimal Classification. Most people don't have enough books for it make sense though.
For me, I don't have that many paper books and the ones I own I know by the side and the color. I keep the books that I reference often in a separate place. I noticed I don't need to find all of the books, all of the time. So organize most of your books to look pretty.
You can also group similar books together on a single shelf and then order them by color. For example I have a dozen of cookbooks and those go on a separate shelf, arranged in a rainbow. I also have a book series that goes neatly together, so I keep them it grouped too.
I also organize my clothes like that too. By general category first (t-shirts, pants, socks, jackets), and then by color.
I used to be extremely messy too (piles of clothes and documents, cardboard boxes, you know the deal). I turned it around after I read the Marie Kondo book "The life-changing Magic of Tidying up". Then after I got the mess under control I look at the pictures for inspiration how to make it aesthetically pleasing. I got a lot of ideas from Pinterest (I know, I know), but you can do an image search or check the organization subreddits too.
Doesn't that make it exceedingly hard to locate specific books?
One thing I have notices about modern books is that they are a freaking huge. I have a large number of novels from the 1970s. Their are all 250 - 400 pages, about the the same as my wife's moderns books about people getting murdered. The 50 year old books are less than half the size. Why is there a need to make modern books into tomes?
Probably makes it feel more legitimate and "booky". Some young people i know got obsessed with the idea they should read more because it makes people more intelligent. Then they choose the murder of the week to read. If it's the same size as Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov it feels much weightier and important. In addition to flashy colorful covers, I'd imagine it's just an effective marketing choice
While I agree with the sentiment, I have hesitation in letting people see what I read.
In a way, you're letting people see the nature of things that you read - from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts, and privacy is something we all value. For that reason (and since I don't have any particular sentimental value for books, only their contents) I've long since preferred a digital library. As a minimalist, having a single Kindle on the table is aesthetics enough for me, which is complementary of the minimalist viewpoint as well.
However, I completely agree with the fact that having a physical library is a very conducive environment for kids to grow up with. I remember fun memories of my childhood reading from the home library, and thinking how pretty and colourful the shelves were too. But I think there should be a distinction between cultivating a library for your kids, versus that for the observation and assessment of strangers.
That, to me, is closer to a policy of isolation than privacy, which sounds unhealthy to me, unless maybe you're some kind professional spy or military strategist. Privacy is good; so are water and salt. We also value connection.
Minimalism is secretly about maximizing something, perhaps empty space and silence, or perhaps something else that you love.
Finally, life is layered on as we live it - that kid is still in there somewhere ;)
I'm not trying to prescribe necessarily, just giving a different point of view.
> While I agree with the sentiment, I have hesitation in letting people see what I read.
Woah there. Nobody* is showing off their playboy collection either. The visible bookshelf is just what you want others to see. You don’t even have to read those books. It’s like your Facebook wall - a facade of yourself.
* of course there are people proud of their playboy collection and showing it off
Do you not have human conversations with your friends and family? That's also a way for them to learn about you.
I like your view in this because it's just so different than anything I've thought before. Having books in common areas sparks conversation, real, substantive conversation with family, friends, and acquaintances. It's one of my favorite things to talk about at get togethers.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I share what I read, but only with very close friends. I'm hesitant to lend books out -- people are not great at returning them (partly my fault, I'm also bad at tracking the loans). I also have a hard time finding my books, as I live in a very small house (bookshelves are out of the question, it's numbered bins).
I am also wary of most of the cloud services in this domain.
So I wrote a little software to manage the situation -- just a simple CRUD thing that lets me manage a small personal library, or a small shared library between friends. It's not a "social network for books" or something grand like that. Just a simple self-hosted thing with minimal system requirements. There were some existing solutions, but none that really felt right.
It's published (open source) and has a few users, but I don't think I'll be able to manage it, if it receives a giant burst of attention. On github it's called 'ubiblio'. Perhaps I'll be ready to share it more generally in a few months.
Amazon through the kindle is storing massive amounts of data about your reading habits. Statistically, and inevitably, this information will be used against your best interests.
Maybe simply to sell you something you don’t need, to price up your insurance, or as a layup to a precrime you have yet to commit.
If reading privacy matter a kindle isn’t it. Imho.
To me “minimalism” is just a poor excuse for bad design and aesthetic sense, like dressing all black or white to avoid color coordination. It’s easy, but totally devoid of personality and expression.
>from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts, and privacy is something we all value.
I mean you let them into your house, privacy kinda goes out the window when you do that. You can always put books you don't want people to know you read in your bedroom or something.
> I have hesitation in letting people see what I read [...] privacy is something we all value.
Other people are replying to you acting like this is strange, but it's actually something normal people do all the time.
Every politician being interviewed from their home for TV news, every professor recording video lectures, every remote working CEO, and every twitch streamer has considered what is on display behind them.
If I choose shelves as my background, do I want eagle-eyed viewers to see my copies of playboy, my figurines of naked anime ladies, and my copies of the communist manifesto and mein kampf? As a matter of fact I don't.
I get that sentiment, it's not like I would put everything on display indiscriminately.
However, a statement like this "they might glean the nature of your thoughts", strikes me as .. lonely, if nothing else. I want privacy from Facebook and the general public, etc. But people that I invite into my house are people I am going to have conversations with and I want them to know the "real me", whatever that means, or at least a closer approximation of it. I certainly wouldn't want them to think that my political beliefs are something completely different from what they actually are.
>In a way, you're letting people see the nature of things that you read - from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts
Nobody cares what you think. But if there are state-sponsored actors that do, they have way more insight into your life than the _nature of things that you read_ from physical texts you own. Digital library gives off a much resonant footprint in this regard.
I will not buy DRMed ebooks. I hate the idea that someone can delete a book I bought. Once I have a book, I want to keep it.
I have quite a lot of books that belong to be grandfather, and lots that belonged to my parents. A lot of those will last another generation, maybe more. That does not happen with ebooks either.
Where do you live? If you live in the USA you're violating the DMCA, if you live in the EU it is the EUCD which you'll be breaking, elsewhere there may be similar directives. That 'they get their money' does not make any difference here, it is the 'circumvention of technological protection measures' which makes you into a law breaker.
On that note, does anyone have a copy of "The C programing language" (first edition) that isn't falling apart because the acid paper is decaying? I was referring to my copy the other day and it is clear the days I own that book are numbered because of planned obsolesce in the 1970s. I never bought the second edition, but if I did I'm sure it too would be falling apart from age before my likely death.
First edition may be collectible regardless of condition. And as well as newer editions it is resalable. Can you sell an used ebook you bought? How about can you buy an used ebook?
I don't have it because it is collectable. I have it because it is a great book and I still refer to it once in a while. (mostly I can find what I need on the web, but once in a while what K&R really said is important - though mostly for online arguments)
I got a lightly used copy off Amazon, along with "The UNIX programming environment" a year or two ago, probably. They're both fine with only a bit of wear, but I don't think they were ever of a super sturdy binding that would hold up well under heavy abuse.
Unless latest means "In the last few months" then no it's still trivial. I buy a lot of "Kindle" books, but I always rip the DRM and make an ebook version I actually use and archive. My attitude is that once I pay for a song/game/book/etc... it's no one's business, but my own how I use it (for myself I mean, obviously uploading it to others is a different issue).
I think it's easier with some providers than others. I bought an Amazon ebook that I was really struggling to de-DRM (so I promptly returned it and have only bought books with Adobe DRM since).
Erm, i have a "friend" that has a few fancy signed physical hard covers that were never opened... because they took their sweet time to arrive so said "friend" downloaded the epub...
Also back in the day when games came on discs, they used to download the no cd crack before opening the shrink wrapped box.
I think we have the same friend. He told me he likes to download a book to get a feel for it… like thumbing through a book in a bookshop. If it’s good, he goes ahead and buys it.
> Customers were not even compensated for lost data, unless they had paid for backups [which were also lost], with the company saying cloud customers should be handling their own disaster recovery plans.
the challenge is I don't love my books for the content, but for their essence, so ebooks just aren't as valuable. If my physically books were destroyed in a fire I would be sad because i lost the objects, not temporarily lost access to the contents.
For me it's a bit of both. A programming book that I wrote over 10 years ago - the content is long out of date but the weight reminds me of the effort I put into producing it. Then there's my father's library, all 2000 books of it. I've kept about 50, on a wide variety of topics, and I value them both for the unusual content (Ancient churches of Wales; Jazz record catalogs from the 1940s; English artists from the early 20th century) and for the fact that they remind me of him.
I'm kind of the opposite, I can't bring myself to let go of my collection of paper books, or even to stop buying a new one every so often, but I do not like the physical experience of reading one nearly as much as I like the experience of reading on a phone or kindle. holding a book in one hand and turning a page with a click is a really wonderful way to read.
The standard I arrived at is roughly "would I be sad if, in 15 years, I forgot about this book/piece of music?". If it's something that I enjoyed so much today that I'd be afraid to lose it amongst 10,000's of eBooks or songs on a streaming platform, I physically buy it.
Exactly. I've even gone to the trouble of getting ebooks of physical books that I have in some cases. I vastly prefer the size and weight of an e-reader as compared to most books, plus the ability to change the font size to something I can easier read as opposed to the small fonts often chosen by paper books to minimize pages.
> I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
I've long thought the purchase of a book should be considered a licence: you pay a little more if you want a physical version too, but they're not separate things; the digital ebook comes free/is the basic way your licence can be exercised.
(Ideally licenced people would be allowed to order cheap replacements if they damaged the physical copy, but how would you stop fraudulent sale & continual replacement-ordering.)
My phone has come up in some dreams. But it seems my dream world can't properly render it cause it's always blurry, but even when I'm doing something specific, it has never, not once, worked the way its supposed to. My dream phones always do about 1 action and then completely stop responding. Then i get confused because i had a specific task in mind that's slowly fading and all i know is this diffusing rectangle in my floating palm is disobeying me. The dream moves on
I have a recurring dream where I'm trying to type something on my phone, and it never comes out right, I delete and try again and again, can't hit the right buttons
There's a "threat simulation theory" that sort of explains it, but it's not 100% correct for everyone.
TL;DR: in dreams your brain often seems to practice "threats"/stressful situations. E.g. you're more likely to dream about missing work, having exams, car breaking, running from someone, interacting with someone you care about etc. rather than doing something you're completely used to.
I wonder if very small children dream about screens then don't understand. Like, if a poor small child got hit with the car commercial or the maze jump scare, would that get added to the threat list? I'm talking young enough that they can't tell you it's a screen. Do babies dream? What could they ever dream about? Is there a library of set concepts that we're all genetically made to fear, if so, how would that be represented in dreams? Gosh
Honestly probably yes to all of those. Except for small children the dreams are probably also non-visual like in the case of blind people.
They probably dream about "weird feelings" (chills, shivers, cold, heat etc) and smells and sounds and whatnot.
The TST also assumes that some of the instincts are inherited from our ancestors (e.g. that uneasy feeling when you walk alone through the forest at night - because for thousands of years predators could kill you in that exact scenario) so a baby's brain might dream about those feelings too (probably without visuals, just chemically induced feeling of uneasyness).
And back to the screen scenario:
To the brain "excitement" is also "stressful" from a chemical PoV. So if you really really enjoyed some game (as a kid or whatnot) you probably dreamt about it too.
Even if the last thing going through my head before sleep is related to programming (which is quite often the case), I cannot remember having dreamed of computers, ever.
that's interesting, i don't remember my dreams often but I do remember books and comics - I even distinctly remember being lucid, reading a really good comic - but not my screen work or apps. Perhaps my brain just cannot LLM them convincingly?
Are there lucid dreamers that sit behind their dream computers? If so, what are they doing, and do the programs give coherent responses? Are people playing chess or solo card- en boardgames or with dream characters?
I understand your pain, we all seem to make dichotomies where none should exist.
Getting rid of print books is not a prerequisite for carrying your entire library with you. Why not both meme.
Hopefully ebooks will get to the point where they offer a better experience than paper books. But my mind does not handle the information in nearly the same way when using ebooks. I find them wonderfully valuable and productive, but in the same deep introspective way. They are transactional, focused and very task directed.
I ebooks better for reading already. Physical books advantage is that I can read inside them in bookstore - bookstores are much better for me when I looking for something new.
Are you reading, or are you studying? When reading my phone is great. When I want to study though I will want to take notes, compare tables on different pages and other such things that my phone doesn't work for.
I actually prefer ebook for both - including for studying. If the book I want to study requires larger screen, I prefer notebook. I never wrote into books, if I am taking notes it is on paper and sometimes electronically (with keyboard).
> I actually prefer ebook for both - including for studying.
Really?? What ereader do you use? How are you taking notes (that you would be able to retrieve later in a reasonable manner), using the index, etc? I've wanted for years to switch to electronic books for nonfiction that I want to learn from, but software for reading feels so bad for this purpose.
I have a library of work-related books (military). Most of the great ones have no digital alternative. Authors of rare or definitive works know to avoid digital formats. Last year I paid 200+ to get my hands on a newly printed book because i know it will still be relevant on my shelf in 10/20/30 years. After reading it once I may leave it on that shelf for years. One day i will need it again. I will know where to find it no matter what OS i will then be using.
I cannot champion this guy enough. His website belongs jn the 90s (it needs the "www") but his skills in open source analysis and drawing are unmatched. (He draws in MS paint!)
I read all fiction on my Kobo these days. I used to collect paperbacks but they take up a lot of space, especially if you're getting through 20+ books a year. I basically hoard books on my Kobo so I never don't have another book to read.
I do remove the DRM, though. I still want to own books.
But paper is still by far the best format for textbooks. It's not even close.
For similar reasons I went back to physical books.
To add an additional change I noticed. Before I used to be big on reading as much as possible, remember everything. I’d get anxious if I forgot some details.
But now that’s all gone. I’ve learned to slowdown. I enjoy the books more and don’t worry too much about finishing it or remembering everything. I’m now deliberate about building my library. If I forget something I don’t sweat, if it comes back it comes back.
It could also have to do with age and COVID induced reprioritisation; either way I’m more at peace with where I’m about reading. I don’t think I’ll go back to digits books.
And oh now my children and wife know what I’m reading and who knows some shared reading habits could develop.
Another part is I didn’t like my kids seeing me staring at a screen all the time, especially when they were young enough to not get the distinction between eink and lcd.
What’s worse is id be reading all these books and they’d have no idea, even incidentally, what I was reading. Now we’ve probably got 500-600 books on the house and kids are always pulling out something to read.
I still get ebooks sometimes to search for something specific or to feel out a book. I still use my remarkable tablet for papers and things, but my personal library (filled with my personal notes that’ll last my life) is very precious to me.
I got rid of all novels and pop science books. They are fine to read on a kindle and rarely re-read. My physical books are textbooks and reference books (dictionaries, atlases).
I am a mathematician and I used to get a ton of mileage out of Google for research. I got really good at working out likely phrases other researchers would use for concepts that I encountered, and using Boolean operators to filter out pages with similar keywords. I think those days are over sadly. I think we will see a resurgence of personal libraries.
I have some books from my childhood still, and while I'm not really interested in reading them, my parents and others that gave them to me as gifts made sure to write a note of sorts in the cover. It's a great idea, if you give books as gifts. Make sure it's written in the book itself, not a separate (loseable) postcard or something. Add a date and the occasion.
I love a paper back, but man did I fall in love with ebooks in the last year and a half. I own a Kindle and a Kobo and it's just so incredible for traveling (instead of carrying two books in my backpack) and in bed (the screen backlights are just fantastic).
I absolutely buy certain books physical still, if they're of a certain quality or meaning to me. If Martin Fowler released a new book tomorrow, I'd get it physical. Hell, I might even buy a physical and digital copy.
That said, digital is now my default way to read a book.
I did the exact same thing. I'm back to buying real books, but I will say I still use my ereader in situations without good lighting or where the book is just too cumbersome. Sometimes that means I get the book twice which is suboptimal, but I strongly prefer the reading experience of a physical book. My appreciation of the work is even higher when the reading experience is better.
I agree physical books are great since you can hold them, smell them - nothing like an ebook. There is also a big advantage for us middle-aged folks that ebooks have and that's adjustable font size. Bifocal glasses help bit making font bigger is better.
I like to rent/buy eBooks for the first-time read, and if I like the book, buy the physical version.
Few things are more satisfying to me being able to hand a book off of my shelf to a friend when I think that they would like it, and having them report back they read and liked the book.
I really enjoy audio books much more than reading (perhaps it helps me feed my need to "consume", as I can listen to them while doing other, menial things) but I also enjoy buying the same titles and filling out a physical book shelf.
I love the visual appraisal of a library a lot more in person than on a screen.
I went this route as well, and I've now repopulated many of my favorite books from my youth in physical editions. I wish more physical books were like Goodman Games where any purchase includes a digital download code.
Regretfully, I still prefer generally reading on my Kindle, so I end up buying two copies of the book.
I can relate! A well-bound book is such a perfectly designed thing. A few books on my shelf were printed over 100 years ago, they have a very special weight to them.
Ebooks are also a miracle; a literal library on a microsd is mind-bogglingly amazing.
I just love the experience of reading a paper book, especially in trade paperback - which is weird because it's not a great format, but something about the dimensions (as long as the book isn't too long), and the cover and the feel and the paper...
I'd love to have bundles where you can get the physical and ebook at the same time. Going on holiday it is ideal to have an ebook reader to carry many books, but, like you say, there is something precious about having books lined up on shelves to see them.
It’s also a great practice if you actually wish to own the things you purchase. Same with things like music, movies, games. If it’s just on a cloud platform it will disappear one day.
The real question is why did you feel the need to be so extreme? Why couldn't you just do a little digital rather than fully? I don't understand this all or nothing stuff. Live moderately
Was this recently (say, after 2014?) Try finding a computer with an optical drive today. You need to get an external USB device today, modern cases don’t have external 5-inch bays.
Another problem is all the music apps and services that we’re supposed to use according to the music industry are streaming services: Spotify doesn’t have a CD-player feature; it wouldn’t surprise me if today’s new-computer-user had no idea that CD-ripping was even possible.
I have a whole drawer full of barely used cdrom drives from decommissioned office PCs to play my audio discs, in case my Philips Player from 1995 is worn down -- didn't even need a repair yet, so no real worries...
Additionally the CDs get backuped as FLACs.
I don't see what's "hard" with that approach. Most new releases still get presses as CDs.
Pressed CDs - which most of them are (pressing is much cheaper in quantity) will generally last well. Record able CDs (like you buy from the individual artist won't last much longer.
Either way though I have long since ripped my CDs to my NAS system. I keep the CDs in storage so if someone says copyright I can prove fair use as I still own the media.
I'm an avid reader. But about maybe 15 years ago, I stopped buying printed books because I felt guilty - they took up too much space, and it was running scarce. And surely ebooks were superior - no space wasted, I could take an entire library with me, etc. It was just a matter of getting used to them, and abandoning the impractical romanticism of fetishizing the printed page.
At that time, I pretty much stopped reading. Now it's obvious why that happened, but at that point I didn't really connect the dots. I thought that I ran into a bad streak of books that just didn't hook me much, and then I was very busy, I always seemed to have something else to do rather than continue reading. So for those hypothetical reasons I went from reading several books per month to one per year, or even less.
At some point, I read a printed book and it hooked me like in the old times. And then, it dawned on me that the books being bad, or me being busy, were just excuses. The real reason is that I didn't like electronic reading. I wasn't proud of this. It wasn't a rational attitude. Electronic reading was clearly superior (less space, more flexibility and so on), and the content was exactly the same. I was actually quite ashamed of myself: was I such a shallow person that I didn't appreciate the contents of the literature enough to abstract away from purely materialistic concerns? What kind of person can't appreciate culture or art just because they don't like the medium used to transmit it? But be that as it may, the plain truth was that ebooks didn't hook me, and physical books did, so I admitted it and started buying printed books again. And once again, I'm an avid reader.
In the last few years, papers and studies have started to appear saying that with paper reading we retain more, we concentrate more, we learn more, etc... so I have started to reconcile with myself. Maybe I'm not a shallow materialistic asshole after all, and it's just human nature.
It's weird, but I find myself abandoning ebooks much easier than printed books. It's actually very rare that I abandon a printed book, but very common that I put off finishing an ebook.
I wonder why. What you say rings true.
As silly as it sounds, my emotional connection to ebooks is somehow weaker.
I'm jojoing on this for at least 15 years at this point. I really appreciate the physical experience of real books, the smell, the weight, just as you describe it. At the same time I really despise the storage space they take up, collecting dust, never to be touched again. So I go full digital for a while and read books on my Scribe. I get decision paralysis really quickly because of all the content available at a finger press, but the note taking and accessibility of it all are really nice. But after a while I grow tired of this and buy some hardcover books again and really enjoy that.
This cycle has been repeating for me for a long time, I wonder if I'll find a good balance eventually. My current approach is to try and read more technical stuff digital while keeping novels, the humanities, history as paperback, we'll see.
I definitely agree that just giving kids a laptop/chromebook instead of books is not working. My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That said, one thing I appreciate is that she doesn't have to lug around 30lb backpacks like kids did when I was a child. We had lockers, but realistically they didn't provide adequate time to utilize them, so everyone just carried around all their books for the day. Most of us hunched forward because of the weight.
It seems like something like a dumb ereader would be a good middle ground? Put all the textbooks into one place, but don't give it the ability to do anything but read? That or keep the textbooks in the classroom and share.
Physical books are still better than e-readers because you can put sticky notes on the pages, jump back and forth between pages quickly, and even start to know where pages are simply based on how many leaves/pages are split between your left and right hand. Textbooks are basically reference books, my favorite dictionaries I start to "learn by hand" to know where to flip to approximately to start my search.
On the one hand, yes, I agree. There's something about the tactility of a book, about dogeared pages, and marginalia, and having muscle memory to open a book at about the same spot where I left off.
I grew up with that and it's a very comfortable skill set.
On the other hand, I've learned ways to manage and reference information in digital formats. Bookmarks and links and pasted snippets. Attachments and full text search. Not to even get into real sicko stuff like Notion and Obsidian and DEVONthink.
Being able to easily flip back and forth between pages is a very useful technique, but so is being able to snap a screenshot of a pdf and keep it open it in another window.
I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
>I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
This, I'm really comfortable with technology, but I feel like a boomer when I watch kids that have grown up with it their entire lives. Some people don't need the ability to cross reference things much, but folks who do develop the skills the need without having to revert to printed material.
I'd agree except for the ability to search in an e-book. There's nothing worse than knowing the textbook in front of you contains the answer you need but not remembering which of the 1500 pages contains it. Being able to CTRL-F saved me hours of time when I went back to school after e-books became common.
For a current project, I've been using a physical book as a reference manual for the API I'm working with rather than using the more typical internet search for the function name. And it's actually somewhat surprising how efficient a physical book is!
Sure, there's a lot of efficiency to Ctrl-F a text string and just find all the places in a document. I won't deny that it takes me longer to pull up the index, search for the function name in the index, then flip to the page. But then I can just leave the book open at that page on the desk (or my lap). I never have to Alt-Tab, or fiddle with the location of windows to switch between looking at documentation and looking at the code I'm working on.
This difference was more stark when I was trying to close-read a different specification to ensure that I understood it well enough to make sure a PR implemented it correctly. I needed to have three different parts of the specification open simultaneously to bounce between all of them. With physical paper, that's just a swish of a hand away. With a PDF reader, well, goto that other section, scroll down to the piece I wanted, now goto the first section again and scroll down again and wait what was that back thing again goto and scroll and scroll and goto and descent into insanity. Trying to use multiple windows ameliorates the problem somewhat, but it also takes an inordinate amount of time to set the view up correctly, and I often end up running into the "focus doesn't follow the eye gaze" problem of typing in the wrong window and ruining the view.
>With a PDF reader, well, goto that other section, scroll down to the piece I wanted, now goto the first section again and scroll down again and wait what was that back thing again goto and scroll and scroll and goto and descent into insanity.
I pretty much just use screenshots in snagit for that stuff.
A decent index solves that just fine. And usually outpaces ctrl-f chasing for a given word, because it's indexing by ideas, not words. (If it's a decent index, that is :)
Good indices are built atop a taxonomy that is then used extensively to list related taxonomic terms. This will give you direct hierarchical terms (loosely maps to what I guess you refer to as by subject) but also related terms. A good indexer will also exercise judgement and check with the author if certain terms are related and in what way.
Let me give you an example of a high-quality index entry from the Software Architecture in Practice (Bass et al. 2021) [1]:
Availability
analytic model space, 259
analyzing, 255–259
broker pattern, 240
calculations, 259
CAP theorem, 523
CIA approach, 147
cloud, 521
design checklist, 96–98
detect faults tactic, 87–91
general scenario, 85–86
introduction, 79–81
planning for failure, 82–85
prevent faults tactic, 94–95
recover-from-faults tactics, 91–94
summary, 98–99
tactics overview, 87
As you see, it lists a number of taxonomic terms that are merely related to each other and you might not think about Ctrl+F-ing for them unless you already want to search for them. You may come to this entry knowing about CAP and navigate away to analytic model space, 259.
Not really. An index is also a list of ideas you should search for. Search for a synonym and control-f fails, but the index will have a "see also" for that, or worst case lets you scan for interesting words without reading the whole book. The index will also leave out all the places where a word happens to be used but are not useful to someone searching for the term.
Of course a good index is hard (read expensive) to write and so many books didn't have good indexes.
You mean like page 20 in the PDF isn't "page 20" in the index? Unless the pages are out of order or extra stuff is inserted, you should be able to simply add an offset. Or worst case, you binary-search the PDF like you would with a book.
There are scanned-in books whose index pages don't precisely match the digital pages. Good PDFs will account for that offset themselves, but manual recalculation may be necessary.
Worse are books half-assedly converted from print to digital. These often include an index (useful for all the reasons others have mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but the "faithful" reproduction of the print text means that the page enumeration in the index bears a nonconstant relationship to the digital text. The offsets are not constant.
Then there are ePubs with the above feature. The sane thing to do would be to link the index entry to occurances. Often you'll find, again, print-edition page mentions which are of little use in locating the passage within your digital edition.
One of the underlying problems is that the print notion of "page" is increasingly archaic. For languages / typographies in which paragraphs are a useful convention, paragraph numbering might be preferable (this should be constant across formats). Direct symlinks are of course useful, but these conceal information revealed in a conventional (print) index such as passages where a topic is discussed at some length, or clusters of appearances, as well as cross-references or associated references which a well-constructed index will reveal.
I can't remember examples like those, but one I deal with is where the index has a different kind of numbering scheme like "E403.1-a". But at least cmd+f maybe works in that case, unless of course that string shows up everywhere.
Technical / government docs often feature such numbering schemes. I believe part of the history is that those documents were often composed in segments or sections, often by independent teams, such that a fixed page enumeration wasn't readily available and/or would change frequently.
There's a pre-digital publishing trend of loose-leaf or removeable bindings, with publications prepared in sections or with periodic supplements, which began in the late 19th / early 20th century. Those would typically be organised and numbered by section. The concept is somewhat trite now, but I think of it as a significant stage and evolution of publishing, somewhere between fixed-format codices, periodicals, and eventually databases and wikis.
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about book indexes being downvoted. In professional publishing houses, indexing is a job done by a qualified indexer and is not as trivial as one may think [1]. Some rather important reading guides [2] recommend to judge a book by its Contents and Index, which are often overlooked in books that were not edited by professionals or were edited in haste.
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about farriers being downvoted. In professional blacksmith shops, horse shoeing is a job done by a qualified farrier and not as trivial as one may think.
Not quite. Not a big fan of analogies of questionable fit, but let's try:
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about importance of horse shoes being downvoted. In professional blacksmith shops, horse shoeing is a job done by a qualified farrier and not as trivial as one may think. The importance of horseshoeing for horse wellbeing is also highlighted in certain key equestrian literature.
My high school was mainly textbooks, then things were more digital in college. Normally I'm against fancy new tech, but this felt like an improvement in hindsight. I was never missing the book I needed, there's cmd+f and page skip, I can annotate without ruining it...
The real problem seems to be licensing. Lots of books are physical-only, and the digital versions are those annoying "epub" files instead of PDFs.
Idk, unless I'm using a very unusual aspect ratio, it hasn't been an issue. The only real difference I've noticed with epubs is I can't just open it in Preview or the iPhone PDF viewer like normal. And it may have DRM.
PDF's work well for a sufficiently large e-book reader. Full-sized isn't essential, though I find the 13.3" display I use is quite pleasant to read --- roughly equivalent to a large iMac Retina display for reading ease (less overall real estate, but more comfortable to hold in one's hands, and of course, read under bright light / direct sunlight), and vastly superior to a typical smartphone.
Smaller displays of 8--10" should work in most cases and are far more affordable. The exceptions are typically scans from print, especially of small-font and tightly-rendered journal articles, or works with extensive graphics and diagrams. Those with young eyes can probably manage better than the olds.
ePub fits any sized display, but there are times when fixed layout truly is preferable for reading, context, understanding, and juxtaposition of text and graphics, etc. With a fixed layout and a competent layout engine or editor this can be optimised. With a flexible layout* (HTML, ePub, etc.) the dynamic element pretty much always leads to compromises or gaffes in layout and positioning.
Fixed-layout also means that spatial memory of where within a document, chapter, and/or page specific elements / contents are. Dynamic layout greatly reduces the ability of those who have strong spatial memory of written materials.
Yeah, there's a reason why Word docs etc all used fixed layouts. Easy to underestimate the complexity of a reactive layout. Even modern websites usually make some assumptions, hence separate desktop and mobile versions.
My understanding is that MS Word's layout (as with some other word-processing software) was strongly dependent on the print drivers installed. So there still was some variability in output.
I tend to prefer LaTeX or a similar doc-prep system myself for authoring.
>Physical books are still better than e-readers because you can put sticky notes on the pages, jump back and forth between pages quickly, and even start to know where pages are simply based on how many leaves/pages are split between your left and right hand.
Only because you prefer to work that way, someone that has grown up with everything digital has equivalent skills doing that stuff using tabs, digital sticky notes, bookmarks, and such.
Many of the beneficial affordances you mention that are available for print but not in ebooks is partly because ebook technology is kind of bad. Navigation and annotation for example could be much better in ebooks if developers put more care into those ergonomics.
The same is true for my students (german school system, iPads form 7th to 13th grade): They are marking, annotating and rearranging parts of the digitized pages as they like. It would be impossible with printed books.
(ok, they could take a picture with the camera and do the same)
They have/use printed books but most of the students are borrowing them from the school and are not allowed to write in them.
So I use mostly digital material and most of the books stay at home for studying (the books are heavy).
You can't do it quickly. Jumping between random pages isn't useful (and not faster than in an ebook), so you want to jump to a specific page, and here ebook is much faster, whether you're opening a page number or a page with some content you remember
> know where to flip to approximately to start my search.
With the use of bookmarks (prepared or improvised with index cards, etc.) or sticky notes, precision jumping within a physical book is very quick, easy, and useful.
Of course it's not, you can't fit all the words in a book on index cards, you can't fit all the appearances of a given character in a story, all the memorable highlights- all trivially done at scale in a digital book. You can't jump from the index at the end to the required 5 pages where this term appears at the speed of a click
And then your highlights also can't unstick because there is some dirt that ruined the stickiness of a note. And your carefully prepared unsticky bookmarks (you didn't have sticky notes around, so you've followed your advice and improvised) can't all fall out just because your book fell with its back up
I'm not claiming that physical books have all the properties of digital ones, or vice versa.
But there are reasonable affordances to a practical extent within both formats.
I have a large print collection, and a much larger digital one, presently largely on an Onyx BOOX ebook reader. I'm well acquainted with the capabilities and limitations on both systems.
(I've discussed the BOOX device fairly extensively in previous HN comments for those interested.)
Reasonable affordance is fine, that's not what I was arguing against (nor you), but the obvious downside of flipping pages: it's not "very quick, easy" (especially in those huge dictionaries!)
They are useful, but relatively bad: you realize there can be book-width worth of pages within a single letter in a dictionary? So all you've done is produced a regular book without any thumb navigation, so none of the physical virtues will help you find the specific word fast
Besides, these are impossible to implement for anything dynamic, so they aren't even useful at all in most of the cases
My high school doesn't use entire textbooks; it uses either excerpts from a textbook or lecture notes produced by the teacher. This solves the 30lb backpack problem nicely: you realistically only bring the necessary notes or textbook required for the last few days of instruction. Anything that's earlier gets left behind at home because you won't need to refer to it often.
Interesting. This is actually a pretty nice middleground. If books were designed more like a binder of notebooks, perhaps by chapter, it would solve the weight issue while still allowing for all the things people love about paper books.
We did this in high school. I kept forgetting what I had to bring for all my textbook-based classes each day or what I had to bring home, so I simply carried ~50lb of stuff everywhere. That's ok cause I got swol. Some kids said this was dumb, but they forgot stuff too.
There is no excuse for schools being so badly organized that this is a problem. It certainly was not a problem when I was at school in the '60s and early '70s. All the books I needed fitted in a briefcase. It also was not a big problem for my children going to school in Norway between 1990 and 2015.
But children should also be taught how to carry backpacks properly, not unbalanced on one shoulder.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But given silisili's lived experience of dealing with 30lb backpacks, chrisco255's statement about that being 'good for you' is simply not correct, unless perhaps that kid is a high school football player weighing 200+ lbs.
Also, only nerds and dweebs use both shoulder straps.
Rather, I don't think it's a simple matter of education, given that there are also social pressures involved.
>I definitely agree that just giving kids a laptop/chromebook instead of books is not working.
I'm not really sure why people are pretending it's an either/or situation. Plenty of things are taught just fine or better with technology, but books still have a purpose.
>My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That stuff is usually blocked or limited on school owned laptops. If it's not your child's school is failing at something that is very basic.
I was talking to my ten-year-old about some recent event and came to ask him how he'd learned about it. "Oh, I often check the news in school at the the beginning of class". I hadn't realized just how far the use of laptops had reached in his school. Putting distractions like that between a young child and the things we want them to study is insane, if you ask me.
Have you ever tried using e-reader? It's slow as hell. Slow in turning the pages, slow in rendering anything that is not text. Making notes functionality is a disaster. Sure, you can search through text, but if it's PDF or images, you are screwed.
I remember carrying my bag full, and still carrying books and notebooks in my arms. It was horrible and I'd end up digging through them to find things, not need it all ... not fun or efficient.
Although I do agree that the idea of making a dumb ereader that is specifically tailored to the educational environment sounds like a cool hacking project, there's a much simpler approach that basically solves 90% of the problems: just take the WiFi card out!
The problem here is not with electronic textbooks per se, but the pervasive adoption of networked applications for school assignments — which in turn is used to decrease grading time so that schools can shove more students onto a single teacher.
Nowhere did they mention social media :-) but emails and Teams work just fine - though one of my students mentioned they can't initiate chats. I'm sure there's workarounds. I just keep my students off laptops as much as possible.
Blocking games websites is like playing whack-a-mole. Our IT dept took all of our Year 7 and 8 students out two classes at a time, installing software or doing something to block a raft of websites.
They were back playing Retrobowl etc a day later. It was pretty funny.
Depends on the school. Some are super locked down, and some don't seem to care at all.
But kids are kids. For example, mine and her friends are using a shared Google slides to drop memes and chat amongst themselves. They always find a way :).
In my experience, when the kids had iPads or Chromebooks all their traffic was routed through the school network and a web filer.
Yeah you could in theory get around it and kids did (generally to play minecraft), but social media was generally well blocked, and all traffic monitored. It is made very clear that these devices are NOT personal devices for personal activity / they're monitoring them.
Going away from physical book-based learning was possibly well intentioned (but I have my doubts)... but it was really dumb.
There are clear studies that show reading a physical book (versus a screen) and using and physical pen or pencil on a piece of paper, versus typing or drawing on a screen, leads to higher comprehension and retention of information... and thus much better overall learning outcomes. This doesn't even consider the fact that youtube, discord, and a bunch of other apps are a swipe away on an iPad.
A common solution to the "carrying books around problem" used to be there was the copy you were issued (and mostly stayed at home) and there was a shared classroom copy.
Carrying around 2-3 books plus a binder is not a big deal (and is not a 30lb backpack... more like 10-15 lbs)... we act like this is some sort of massive hardship yet so many of us did this for over a decade of our childhood with no ill effect.
The 30lb backpacks were only a function of our deranged society, economy, and government. I am sure others here will be able to attest that education in Europe not only was better for reasons that cannot be openly discussed in our censorious society, but the textbooks were denser with information that was also better structured, while also being lighter in weight. Lockers are simply not even a thing in Europe because children are carrying less and they have standardized backpacks.
We had lockers in the European high school that I went to. As I recall it was not allowed to bring backpacks into the classroom, you were supposed to only bring the relevant items to each class and keep the rest in your locker.
I don't think the combined weight of all books used in an entire semester would add up to 30lb, maybe if including dictionaries and atlases and other reference litteraturen that was kept in each classroom (or carted around on trollies by the teachers).
You are conflating things, and then also making my argument, but are unnecessarily cantankerous so you just want to argue. Are you a Brit by any chance?
Have you ever seen the school books that Americans had to carry around? They were/are 2"/5cm thick books, weigh a few pounds each, and kids carried around about 6-8 per semester.
You made my point in that European school books are a lot less heavy and also less physically voluminous. The theory behind American books being that more spacing and less information per page makes learning easier, even though all the evidence clearly indicates that is very likely inaccurate.
Even though you are clearly one of those necessarily contrarian types for reasons that are your own, my point still stands that even if you had lockers for other reasons, the fact that school books in most European countries in which I have visited schools, utilize books that are a lot less heavy and are more information dense and can easily be carried around.
What is it with you types that you latch onto meaningless and nonsense things like that you did have lockers, while totally missing the core of the point, that the argument was about the weight and size of books??? That sounds like something you may want to think about.
I'm not sure which European country you're thinking about, but we had lockers, individual backpacks and heavy textbooks. I never used my locker because we didn't have enough time between lessons, so I just carried all my heavy textbooks for the day as did most people.
I would explain it to you, but there are topics that simply cannot be discussed, regardless of how correct, important, and critical they are. I may as well try to tell you about the heliocentric model in the 17th century.
It's certainly up to you, but "my ideas are as important as the heliocentric model, but humanity is so far behind me that I can't even tell you about them" does not speak favorably about your ideas. (Not to mention that it's hard to imagine that the consequences for whatever your heresy is several posts deep in an anonymous HN comment thread would be anything worse than a few downvotes.)
Plus 104 million euros seems like a normal amount of money to spend updating the curriculum for an entire country. This is likely just updating the curriculum over a few years from older books to newer ones and basically unrelated to the divide between laptops and printed books.
Scandinavian countries went very hardcore digital for a while, giving all kids iPads and Laptops, and getting rid of all physical books. This sounds like a strong reversal, and I hope the other Scandinavian countries will learn some lessons from this.
My eldest doesn't like the computers they have in grade 2 (in Sweden). He thinks the things installed on them are too boring and easy. He would rather read books.
Thing is, the school doesn't have a staff librarian any more. As I understand it, they got rid of that position as part of the cost shifting to switch to digital.
My sister is a librarian in Sweden and used to work in schools. She was very upset by this. Fortunately, the government is backpedaling and bringing them back[1]
It’s not special paper—it’s just a computer vision system to help teacher easily convert student work on paper to digital marks. The state of Rajasthan in India uses this product to assess math and literacy for 5 million students each year.
At a personal level, I’m frustrated by son’s school that uses a digital LMS to have teachers assign jpgs of pages of the books. I find it hard to help him because I don’t know what he has done and what he will do—something that a book makes natural. At the same time, I’m a fan of cognitive tutors and other digital instructional materials. Balance is good!
I "discovered" libraries. They are cool! They usually offer more services than just books. But you have plenty of books that you don't need to keep after having read them, and the trip to the library is like a discovery journey.
Even more, my library also has comics and comic books. These are usually quite expensive, and now I can just read them for free.
I recently learned that my library has 3D printers for anyone to use, and microfilm of local newspapers going back to 1797; it really is incredible what you can discover in them!
One interview question I like to give for software engineering candidates at my company is "rough out the model for an online library, where users can check out up to three books, they will be charged for overdue books" etc.
Recently I had a candidate who essentially had no idea what I was talking about. They had never checked out a book from a library.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I still was.
If a candidate comments that libraries are getting rid of overdue fines as research has found it's not effective at getting books back in time, while negatively affecting their poorest members, and that libraries which got rid of fines found it "has raised circulation numbers, brought lapsed users back to the library, and boosted goodwill" (quoting https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/the-end-of-fines ) - would that improve or worsen their changes of employment with you?
Are you looking for someone who will follow orders, or looking for someone who will challenge them?
I suspect no one has brought it up, but wonder if any have decided to not bring it up for worry that a challenge would risk their chance of being hired.
It would neither improve nor worsen their chances. I'm only looking for their ability to model a software application.
I wouldn't see it as a challenge, as it has nothing to do with the task at hand. If they said "I don't want to do this exercise, because I don't believe in library fines," that might hurt their chances.
My comment was more about being surprised that they had never checked out a book from a library, since I thought that was a fairly universal experience, at least for software engineers, but going forward I don't think I'll assume that.
I think books are the best medium for learning some things, and probably in some aspects for writing.
However I'm worried some countries seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are many things that are easier to learn with computers/screens than without as well, they just need to fit the medium. [0]
Intended as a reply, but the comment got deleted, so I might as well include it here:
The article [0] is focused on homeschooling, so the exact points listed there doesn't necessarily have a leg up on traditional media (implying you're in the right environment to facilitate learning these skills well without computers, which I don't think most kids are).
One off-hand example [where screens can be better than a book], would probably be using simulations to assist in learning physics, instead of just solving the equation on a page. Things where interactivity sets the learning in better context than a book probably would.
I'm also very excited to try teaching our child math using apps like DragonBox, which seems to allow for much easier visualization of how to solve equations than I got at school. [1]
I read a lot of books while being at primary and secondary school and most of my colleagues didn't, they had other things to do. Now I read on Kindle and others watch Netflix or scroll Facebook. Form of the book is not a root cause of the problem.
Speaking of school, I find it disturbing that many schools switch to pure digital, i-ready and that some similar shit. The problem with pure digital is that the kids won't learn how to communicate math, like writing down step-by-step solutions to word problems in elementary schools, rigorous geometry proofs in grade 7, and algebraic derivations and proofs after grade 7. Those kind of work was natural to my generation when we grew up - it's just what our teachers trained us to do. And now it's a uphill battle to help my kids even understand the importance of doing proper maths.
A general theme, though, is that I don't get why it's so hard for Americans to stick to the traditional but good practices, like getting rigorous training in STEM, like not solely relying on multiple choices, like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, etc and etc.
The school districts have all kinds of conflicting incentives and priorities. Someone is telling them "go digital, it's the future! Kids have to learn to use technology!" Now folks are telling them "but the kids don't learn well with laptops! Go back to books!" So are they going to abandon the sizable investment they made in getting every kid a Chromebook?
> like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones
There are these things called unions...
This shows how thoughtful our politicians are, they're shooting from the hip at best. It's just dumb luck we haven't fucked up more than we have, and that we have natural resources to lean on (Iron, wood, water).
Everything is over budget, nobody is accountable and psychological wellbeing is way down the drain.
My point being that politicians were going "ooh computers are good, let's slap a computer onto everything", but then only where they can bikeshed computers into the system as it seems easy at first (education). But without national guidelines to make it good, and no guidelines for medical IT and friends. It seems like Estonia "did computers right" more than Sweden.
Apart from learning I'd also like to see more research into the effect switching to digital devices had on tactile skills. I used to mentor at a makerspace a few years ago and at least anecdotally, younger people seemed to have what we in Germany call "two left hands" (don't know if that's an English idiom too).
At least to me it seemed like there's a real loss of fine motor skills. Digital devices are pretty impoverished interfaces. Even if I compare my own handwriting to my parents, who learned cursive more seriously and wrote more by hand I feel like my penmanship is just worse.
You cannot learn everything. Is good penmanship worth spending time on? What are the other options. What if I gave you (8 year old you, your parents when you were 8, and you today - I want all 3 answers) a choice: you can learn cursive, piano, or go out to the playground. What is the best use of your time? My parents would have selected cursive, but on hindsight I can say it was a waste of my time. I always wished I could play piano (this is why I put piano in the list - there are millions of other options you can teach a 8 year old that we do not), but playground time is also valuable and would have appealed to me as a kid.
Sure fair enough, I wasn't trying to narrowly hone in on writing, if you want to make the case for more instrumental education I'm on board with that too. And someone recently actually asked me "where have all the high school bands gone?". It seems like (passive) digital entertainment is eating into all of these activities.
I'm just broadly in favor of incorporating physical development, because who knows what it does to your brain if all you do is push buttons on a screen, as I said anecdotally I don't think anything good. The easy thing to writing about me is that you can basically incorporate it for free. People learning Kanji or math on paper, for one is likely better for retention but also even cheaper practically. As far as I can tell buying students tablets just cost a bunch of money.
Maybe, though when I read those critically I suspect that it is more just time spent on something. Hunting rabbits with a sling requires fine motor skills as well, is that good enough (This is the most primitive, 'uneducated' task I can think of at the moment - there are plenty of others). How does learning violin compare? There are plenty of other possibilities that those arguments don't adequately address.
One aspect to this IMO is the difference in maturity between pencils and paper + books and chromebooks/ipads with software.
Pencil/Paper/Book is extremely mature and the teaching system knows how to use it extremely well. The tools just work and don't distract from learning.
My kid has a Chromebook + Google classroom and it's just a distracting mess of poor hardware and horrific software. Just bad all around the teachers even say it wastes a ton of their time.
Anyone working in tech has a skewed view because we always have excellent hardware and software because of the amount of money the industry has and the way the industry knows that spending on tools pays back in a huge way. None of that applies to schools.
It blows me away that my son got a 2024 Chromebook and the screen is about what I had on my work laptop 20 years ago. But 20 years ago all the software was designed to work on a screen that was sub-1080p, today all the Google software seems to be designed for a 27" 4k screen.
It is a political thing as much as anything. Some old people feel they learned it so it must be good and therefore kids today must learn it. Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not. Nor are we asking if maybe the skill is obsolete and not worth learning. Or maybe it is a niche skill that most won't need and we are better off spending time with something else (like going to the playground). There are probably other good points to debate as well, but generally it comes down to old people teaching what they learned.
I do come down against teaching it. But then I never could read my own writing and am mad about all the trouble I got into in school for it (I have to credit the one teacher who did realize I wasn't lazy and tried to get experts to help me - but dysgraphia wouldn't exist for several more years so nothing came of his attempt). However I'm not clear if manual writing is obsolete for everyone or just me. Right note typing is a useful skill, but text to speech is making progress so maybe in a few years nobody will type and so teaching that skill was wasted.
My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used. A complete waste of time that I never used again. Anyone care to guess what will be useful or not?
Maybe, or is that another thing that belongs to the replication crisis? Is it just cursive or is regular printing good enough? Is it hand writing or would learning to hunt with a sling also work? That article should bring a lot of questions of validity to mind and thus reasons to question if it is real or not. (of course the article is not the preponderance for scientific studies which I don't have access to)
I had no idea that there was a term for my awful handwriting; I think I have dysgraphia, at least based on the Wikipedia-level reading I just did after reading your post. My handwriting isn't quite as inconsistent as the example on Wikipedia, but it's pretty close.
In fourth grade, my teacher called me aside and told me that I need to improve my handwriting or it would really hurt my career prospects. She wasn't being mean, her heart was in the right place, but no matter how hard I tried I was never able to significantly improve my handwriting.
Fortunately my fourth grade teacher was wrong, and I learned how to touch-type when I was fourteen, and I type pretty fast now, to a point where, outside of signing forms, I am not sure the last time I actually wrote something with a pen and paper...2021 I think?
> My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used.
I'm not sure which version of WordPerfect you used, but at least from the mid-90's and onward, a lot of those skills would transfer relatively well to Microsoft Word wouldn't they? I remembered WordPerfect being pretty similar to Office 2003.
> Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not.
I mean, i think feneyman did have something to say about if it was better or not, and why.
Lots of people weighed in. The vast majority knew nothing about how kids learn or what is valuable. (this is on both sides of the debate, and there of course has been a lot of advancement in education in the 50-60 years since)
My 2 cents, valid criticisms of new math are _vastly_ outnumbered by ones more in the form of "I wasn't taught that way and so my kids shouldn't be either" / any change is bad change type thinking. There is a lot of overlap in these criticisms with common core ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core ) which isn't particularly related.
My parents did New Math, and I always thought it sounded pretty cool.
My elementary school math pretty much completely boiled down to doing arithmetic. A useful thing to know, obviously, but I always felt too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
It always seemed like planting the seeds of some more advanced math concepts would make math a lot more approachable.
> too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
I felt the same for a while. Until I realized my college math problems were all selected to make the arithmetic easy. Thus by doing all the arithmetic in my head I had a quick cheat on if I was right or not - wrong answers made for hard math and so I'd start over and thus fix the mistake.
The trick only worked for math though. Physics and chemistry often required harder math and so a calculator was needed to finish on time even when you did the problem right (which wasn't always a given)
I'm not saying that we stop teaching arithmetic, and I'm not even saying that we stop spending a majority of our time on teaching arithmetic, but I think that introducing more advanced concepts early could be a good use of time. It looks like New Math was basically that?
Aside from very occasional drops into printing, I exclusively write in cursive. Once you get proficient you can write very fast with cursive -- regardless of the pen/pencil. Can other people read my writing? Yes, if I slow down. But if it's notes for me, then I can go easily double the speed I have with printing and it feels as "seamless" as touch typing.
It's mostly an issue with English cursive. A lot of styles are just not great.
In Eastern Slavic countries, you are expected to learn to write in cursive and use it in typical writing. Writing in block letters (outside of official forms) is considered to be a sign of illiteracy.
And it really is faster, once you get some practice.
You do not have to use cursive for handwriting notes. What happens with young people (based on what teachers in my kids school said) is that they abandon cursive for handwriting the moment they can - and everyone basically invents own way of writing letters.
End result is worst then if they were taught handwriting that is not cursive, looks more like printed text and is easier to read and write.
I re-taught myself joined-up writing in my early-mid 20s, mainly because it looks nice. Get yourself a pack of Uni Jetstreams - they are not too expensive and glide about as well as any pen I've ever used.
I didn't actually know we'd switched to computers. I knew there was a party, 'Liberalerna' that was for it, arguing for a kind of naïve general digitalisation etc. but I always assumed it was too crazy to be implemented, so I'm very happy with this.
My first grader has a pretty nice Dell 2-in-1 from school (with 8GB of RAM!!!). She had a school-provided iPad in kindergarten. I don’t think either of these things did her any good educationally (except making sure every kid has a device to do remote learning, which thankfully they haven’t had to do yet).
I really think schools should follow the model I had when growing up in the 80s and 90s: use non-internet connected devices once or twice per week in a computer lab until high school.
Tactile thinking remains quite useful and having the basic motor skills translates into manufacturing, the arts, and more of life than many may realize.
Early in my life, I began to "calibrate" my perception. I call it the "eyecrometer"
Today, I can call out sizes, distances, speeds, feeds and more to fairly high accuracy a majority of the time. It has paid off in manufacturing and prototyping more times than I can count.
This all starts with the basics:
Read it, hear it, see it, feel it, do it, say it.
A younger coworker has began a similar journey. And they just started a robotics group on it too.
Be digital. It helps. It has power, but don't trade your potential for the love of trees.
This is causing problems in Australia (where the product is widely used) because confused people put the "stone paper" in the paper recycling, falsely believing it to be paper.
If you wanted to minimize the thickness, you'd probably want to change the formula in several ways:
- use a higher-strength plastic like polyimide;
- include some kind of high-strength fibrous, acicular, or platy reinforcing filler;
- use a more powerful opacifier than calcite, such as rutile, enabling you to use a lower filler loading and thinner layers.
Talc, mullite, fiberglass, and bentonite come to mind as candidate reinforcing fillers, and rutile microcrystals can also be grown in an acicular morphology.
If you really wanted to minimize the thickness and weight, maybe there's some way you could use metal instead of plastic.
I replaced the battery in my second hand first generation iPod maybe three times over ten years.
Then for a number of years I used a late generation Zune that I got new at Walmart for a steal.
Now I use Spotify on a smart phone, and it's a slow web app full of ads, delayed page reloads, unnecessary videos, and a buggy seek widget. The only controls are a touch screen.
It is convenient to have my music player in the same device as... wait, all I wanted was a music player.
I think that in any field (especially in education) a balanced approach needs to be applied to every aspect. And I think this move is a way to strike a balance
You think the Associated Press and its website is AI? The Associated Press that has been in existence for decades? The article does have sources in it, AND links to the website you link to!
Your writing style is also very LLMy... I think you're AI, and not hiding it well.
The popularization of handwriting is, so far, one of our finest achievements. We take it for granted.
To me, handwriting is a skill on par with playing a musical instrument. Very fine motor movement, mind and body, years of practice. It's a miracle we made everyone do it. So much depends on humanity keeping this flame alive.
e-ink tablets with a digital pen would be a good compromise. Kids don't need to carry heavy books, but they should still learn to write using a pen. Clicking and typing simply doesn't give enough tactile feedback for learning.
Not that this would be better but I'm surprised no ebook maker has had success in the educational market. Eink seems like it'd be great for education as it'd really only support text based distractions/bullying which while bad is less bad than the trifecta of video, images and text distractions/bullying. Its also lighter and the battery is longer lasting than a laptop.
My daughter has a chromebook for school. As a device, it's actually pretty nice and the administration aspects of it are fantastic. It can be wiped and re-imaged easily, her "files" are all stored on the network, and it's snappy. Except for PDF viewing.
When it comes to PDFs, it sometimes really struggles. I think that the device can handle them, but I'm pretty sure that the PDFs themselves are often a collection of scanned images and not text. Once she has more than a few tabs open, it takes longer and longer to switch between them and she ends up using a desktop to complete her work.
In this case, the school provides the tools for her to do her assignments but we have the means to provide better ones at home and not every child will have this advantage.
Personally, I can read data sheets all day on a monitor but I absolutely can not do the same with fiction. I either need a paper book or a Kindle, and I don't know why that is. Perhaps it's because I am looking ahead and not down?
Even on slow devices the only problem I have had with PDFs has been when they are rendered using the JS renderer.
The developer of pdf.js replied to my comments on performance somewhere once, and I think it might have been HN, but was quite happy to acknowledge (IIRC) that its not a high performance solution.
I've noticed this with my Kobo ereader (which I love). If I want to go back a few pages, and then return to where I am now, it's a whole ordeal. The UX is there, but I have to learn it and remember it, and it's different for every device (not that I use many different devices). All physical books, miraculously, have the same UX.
The parent post to yours makes me think that a large e-ink display would be useful in a school setting. Rather than carry around a backpack of enormous overpriced textbooks that we might use 30% of in a semester, just have one large ereader that you can use from 1st grade through your PhD.
It's like a book, but lighter! And no internet, no games, no social media, no animations. No private enterprise capturing public education to sell schools a bunch of stupid shit. Just an improvement on a stack of textbooks, which schools or parents have always paid for. Might be nice.
Personally, I would hate this. As a student I far preferred PDFs, etc. because I could quickly make Anki cards out of them, strip mine them for insights and good practice problems and then just burn them into my long term memory over the next few months. We should be teaching children about spaced repetition systems and helping them instill the one habit actually proven to help them remember what they learn, not banishing them back to the Carboniferous Era!
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, and I stand by what I said. :) Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material. That's a separate problem which can be solved with an approach as simple as "turn off the modem".
Nah -- the schools should teach to the average student and address the average problems. I don't begrudge the school system for not catering to me when I went through it.
No one is really average. Even people who are average overall are not average in every skill and every subject.
/classroom
This is an intrinsic problem with classroom teaching. There is an HN discussion about home education (or "homeschooling" as people misleadingly call it) at the moment...
Schools need to teach everyone basic skills for life in society. Whatever those are. In lower grades that is about the same for everyone, but as you move on schools need to push kids to where they will do well. I took metal shop in school, but I was always on the college track and so this was just a fun class I only took because I have one block that nothing else fit in - for all other kids in that class it was essential to their future life and they knew it.
The average student shouldn't be expected to remember more than 5% of what they learn through school because teaching them to use a computer program for half an hour is too hard? That's bleak.
> Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material.
The books are brought back (at a cost) because the kids have proven to learn better from books, or a mix of mediums. They haven't, and won't, use only physical or only digital material. They'll use a mix.
You need to measure long term remembrance of the material, not short-term learning. A 5% increase in the speed of children learning a fact for the first time doesn't matter if the fact has disappeared from all their brains 6 months later, but to accomplish the latter at scale, there's no substitute - you need some kind of spaced repetition system. Otherwise you may as well have not taught the fact at all, and let them spend the time having fun or getting some exercise instead.
Is your idea that 6 to 15 year olds are going to suddenly discover Anki cards on their own and start using them? How high is that %?
I think you should focus more on teachers introducing Anki cards and less on not throwing screens out then, in a sense. I mean, the fact that screens supports something that isn't currently being widely used anyway isn't a very strong argument to keep them.
(And well, the argument against introducing it is that likely very small % of 6 to 15 years are able to or motivated to follow a system like that.)
And the school system already provide ample spaced repetition because there is repetition each year from previous year (at least in Norway, sure Sweden is similar).
The status quo in Norway is horrible, screens have destroyed education system (I have two kids going through it).
I am sure there are better ways to use screens and that is what the proponents always say. But the burden of proof should have been on those introducing screens not the other way around.
There is so much being lost now; ability to concentrate, ability to use a paper and pen as an extension of your brain (as I often do when solving a tough problem).
I don’t think education is purely about remembering facts.
For one, often we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
Secondly, we want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
Optimizing repetition for things we do want to be remembered is certainly a useful technique, but it isn’t the only or perhaps even primary goal of education.
>[O]ften we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
I've never found remembering the simplified explanation to be a hindrance to learning the more complicated explanation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have found times where forgetting the simple explanation before ever getting to the more complicated one meant it felt like I was learning the complicated one from scratch.
>[W]e want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
You can't learn any of that stuff without having the facts at hand first, however.
More importantly, "recall" is a much broader subject than it may sound at first: The ability to tackle novel mathematical theorems is based largely upon one's recall of prior proofs, which I have found to be just as valuable a target for spaced repetition approaches as any. But even if it turned out that wasn't the case, simply separating one's school day into an hour or two of "recall work" followed by 5-6 hours of "dynamic work" where we work with and elaborate upon facts that everyone in the class is statistically guaranteed to remember sounds like a much better use of one's time.
I have no idea what the actual science referenced here is on this but I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
And spaced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
>I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
Likewise, I'm sure that science is weaker than it first appears.
I can point you to dozens of studies showing spaced repetition is robust and effective, across a wide variety of domains.
>[S]paced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
In fact I only found out about spaced repetition near the end of high school, so no, I wouldn't call it "part of education since forever". In fact I consider the fact it isn't a topic we scream about from the hilltops and make it a known thing for students a great civilization-wide error. It seems closer to an open secret that was a lot less well known even just a decade ago.
It's also not "slightly" easier with a PDF, it's much easier. Individual cards that would take much longer to create by hand (image occlusions in particular) take less than a minute with software. There is a reason I insist upon using ebooks these days, paper books just can't compete with that kind of efficiency.
How is your particular description of spaced repetition really even relevant to the discussion?
Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium. ”But I can scan my pdfs and make flash cards” isn’t really an argument that applies to most children I think. So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday. Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
This is about this question: with learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
>Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium.
>Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday.
No, you genuinely can't. Your example shows exactly why. First, your whole time horizon is bounded within a single week; second, reviewing the same thing every day for 4 days in a row is horribly inefficient, as anyone who actually went through that in school is apt to remember. Your example is also bound to a single week, which means the average topic will be remembered for a month at most afterwards - that's not a good long term learning outcome at all. That adds up to 16 years where you walk out with 99% of everything you did just forgotten, and that's just pointless.
For proper long term retention of anything, we need something that not only lasts longer than a week, but that can persist across grades. A SQLite database can do this. I have a lot less faith in any human-meditated lesson plans doing this.
>So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
I follow this process with my own family, but ideally one's teachers should take responsibility for teaching and making sure students continue to do their Anki reps. It's borderline negligent not to.
>Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
Counterexamples abound to this. You are speaking to one.
Many, many students happen upon the life-changing magic of the humble flashcard, even without the force multiplier of a spaced repetition system. In middle school my class was required to use them for the first month of a foreign language, where we were expected to learn about 25 new words per day. After that, they were optional.
Nearly everyone who did well in the class continued to create and use these flashcards, because they simply worked much better than any other technique. This was a pattern which persisted all the way through high school. Of those who didn't, one cannot say it was because they had no experience with it - they simply chose not to invest the extra time and energy the flashcards required. But if this technique is so efficient, and its results so robust, then we should consider that an egregious misallocation of school time itself! And don't get me started on what could be possible with software-based spaced repetition flashcards, which are easier to make and much easier to time correctly.
>[W]ith learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
My experience still suggests ebooks win hands down. The benefits are obvious. The real problem here is not the technology, but the distractibility of the students. Disconnect the device from the Internet during study hours, or hire an IT admin capable of maintaining a proper whitelist - whatever, but solve the real problem. Don't go back to the horse and buggy because people are too addicted to joyrides in the Fiat.
”If schools used different methods in education then mediums would have benefits there”
Teachers want the medium that gives the best results for the process they are using, one can assume. If that process is suboptimal that’s a different, perhaps much harder thing to change.
It’s of course quite possible that the methods used by teachers are identical, inferior or superior to those you suggest. Or that they are the best methods for the mediums that exist (causing a kind of chicken and egg problem)
But I think the only relevant discussion here and now is how these teachers given their education and their mandated study plans (and methods) optimize their education, and what science has to say about that.
To draw a parallel to reading for other purposes, I’d never manage to get through even a short novel on an e-ink reader much less a screen.
I print any scientific articles I have to read on paper otherwise they are much much harder to understand.
Anecdotal and N=1 but I don’t think I’m alone in my Fiat.
You can't screenshot a physical book nearly as easily as a PDF. That's an issue for making flashcards out of a whole host of useful informational visuals, not to mention stuff that is just plain hard to communicate in plain text.
Yes. Over 12 years of use I have consistently found spaced repetition to be the most enjoyable way to learn basically anything, and essentially the only way to ensure things I don't regularly use as part of my job continue to be things I can remember. Some subjects I have in rotation at the moment: Finnish, Haskell, SQLite database internally, cash management and financial jargon, old photos and video clips of my childhood cat who I loved dearly.
But, more to the point: You seem confused as to the true generality of the technique. Flashcards can be used in much more interesting ways than just checking to see if you can recite all the lines of Homer correctly or something.
The vast majority of cards I have are questions of understanding - e.g. a card like "How many unique strands of DNA can be made from 100 A-T pairs and 100 C-G pairs?" You can't memorize all those digits. You need to remember how to solve the problem, which is quite simple, but not so simple it's worthless for a non-mathematician to solve without pen and paper.
Well yes perhaps I am confused, because if the cards strength lies in their ability to capture understanding beyond what is written in the text directly then the ability to create them via copying and pasting means that your claim that digital resources are superior to paper based ones because of this is lacking
The question side of the card may be directly copied from the textbook, and read something like "An increase in the supply of a complementary good Y typically causes the price of good X to [...]." You can then correctly answer "decrease" or "lower" or "go down". You don't need exact phrasing, because you are grading the card yourself; and actually forming the cloze deletion is in most SRS programs a single keyboard shortcut away. This 10 second loop of copy, cloze delete, create gets you a huge amount of the benefit of learning and remembering the reasoning embedded within the sentence. Imagine trying to create a cloze deletion by hand - you'll be there for 2 minutes just copying the sentence.
The next level up is an image occlusion, where you actually screenshot an entire diagram, math equation, section of code, etc. and then selectively hide parts of it, asking yourself to fill in the blank. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155
Image occlusions are close to trivial in a program like Anki once you've made a few. But they are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to make flashcards of unless you feel like drawing e.g. an anatomically correct human brain the same way 17 times in a row.
I went fully digital some years ago, gave away most of my printed books and bought ebooks only. Now I have my whole library in Calibre and on my Kindle. Why? Because I have my whole library with me. And I can download my highlights and process them. Into notes in Obsidian, that I can link to in my study notes.
Recently I started buying paper based books again. Man, I missed holding physical books in my hands. And I start to regret having gotten rid of my physical library. There were so many memories I had with most of these books. I remember their covers, and instantly my emotions , thoughts, feelings are triggered. I don’t have these emotions when I think of my digital books.
My spouse has books that she was gifted when she was a child. Still in our kids shelf. I cannot give her my digital books.
I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
Printed books are a physical experience. Something that allows me to attach thoughts, emotions, feelings to it. And they can become part of my life. Like a good friend.
And let's be honest, a good book collection is a great addition to a room, aesthetically. People tend not to talk about that aspect, I think they worry about being seen as pretentious showing off their books. But I think a book collection can be a great decoration, just as flowers or a painting can be.
And if you have family or friends over and one of them sees something they like, you can lend it to them there and then (if you are so inclined). Some of my earliest reading-related memories are being in an uncle's or neighbour's house and being fascinated by a book on a shelf that they kindly let me take home to read.
I actually made the opposite experience. Books nowadays have so many different format and colors, it’s really hard to make it esthetically pleasing, I have multiple walls full of books and they look like a mess, I dislike it.
Even if I could make it look nice, it would then be an intellectual mess, it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Actually, good question, how do you people organise your books? (Full disclosure, I’m messy)
Learn French and then you can have a wall of books with white spines.
I organize them by the color, either rainbow-style or from darker to brighter.
> it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Libraries solve this with the Dewey Decimal Classification. Most people don't have enough books for it make sense though.
For me, I don't have that many paper books and the ones I own I know by the side and the color. I keep the books that I reference often in a separate place. I noticed I don't need to find all of the books, all of the time. So organize most of your books to look pretty.
You can also group similar books together on a single shelf and then order them by color. For example I have a dozen of cookbooks and those go on a separate shelf, arranged in a rainbow. I also have a book series that goes neatly together, so I keep them it grouped too.
I also organize my clothes like that too. By general category first (t-shirts, pants, socks, jackets), and then by color.
I used to be extremely messy too (piles of clothes and documents, cardboard boxes, you know the deal). I turned it around after I read the Marie Kondo book "The life-changing Magic of Tidying up". Then after I got the mess under control I look at the pictures for inspiration how to make it aesthetically pleasing. I got a lot of ideas from Pinterest (I know, I know), but you can do an image search or check the organization subreddits too.
Organizing books by colour, couldn't resist the link to Two Ronnies :) https://youtu.be/AYxmPHLU9oA?si=n8OACTqPyZ12oWeA
Put them backwards in the shelves – now everything is calm and paper-coloured.
Doesn't that make it exceedingly hard to locate specific books?
One thing I have notices about modern books is that they are a freaking huge. I have a large number of novels from the 1970s. Their are all 250 - 400 pages, about the the same as my wife's moderns books about people getting murdered. The 50 year old books are less than half the size. Why is there a need to make modern books into tomes?
Probably makes it feel more legitimate and "booky". Some young people i know got obsessed with the idea they should read more because it makes people more intelligent. Then they choose the murder of the week to read. If it's the same size as Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov it feels much weightier and important. In addition to flashy colorful covers, I'd imagine it's just an effective marketing choice
Probably right about the "booky"-ness. Sadly I really like the older sizes much better, but very little is published in that "form factor".
And they improve room acoustics a decent amount, making the space that much more pleasant.
Are books like a natural version of those fancy futuristic sound panels in recording studios?
Yeah, diffusers. Smears first reflection time. Probably some low end absorbtion too.
That would require quite a lot of books.
What would? A bookshelf is literally a diffuser and bass traps are all about mass.
While I agree with the sentiment, I have hesitation in letting people see what I read.
In a way, you're letting people see the nature of things that you read - from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts, and privacy is something we all value. For that reason (and since I don't have any particular sentimental value for books, only their contents) I've long since preferred a digital library. As a minimalist, having a single Kindle on the table is aesthetics enough for me, which is complementary of the minimalist viewpoint as well.
However, I completely agree with the fact that having a physical library is a very conducive environment for kids to grow up with. I remember fun memories of my childhood reading from the home library, and thinking how pretty and colourful the shelves were too. But I think there should be a distinction between cultivating a library for your kids, versus that for the observation and assessment of strangers.
That, to me, is closer to a policy of isolation than privacy, which sounds unhealthy to me, unless maybe you're some kind professional spy or military strategist. Privacy is good; so are water and salt. We also value connection.
Minimalism is secretly about maximizing something, perhaps empty space and silence, or perhaps something else that you love.
Finally, life is layered on as we live it - that kid is still in there somewhere ;)
I'm not trying to prescribe necessarily, just giving a different point of view.
> While I agree with the sentiment, I have hesitation in letting people see what I read.
Woah there. Nobody* is showing off their playboy collection either. The visible bookshelf is just what you want others to see. You don’t even have to read those books. It’s like your Facebook wall - a facade of yourself.
* of course there are people proud of their playboy collection and showing it off
Do you not have human conversations with your friends and family? That's also a way for them to learn about you.
I like your view in this because it's just so different than anything I've thought before. Having books in common areas sparks conversation, real, substantive conversation with family, friends, and acquaintances. It's one of my favorite things to talk about at get togethers.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I share what I read, but only with very close friends. I'm hesitant to lend books out -- people are not great at returning them (partly my fault, I'm also bad at tracking the loans). I also have a hard time finding my books, as I live in a very small house (bookshelves are out of the question, it's numbered bins).
I am also wary of most of the cloud services in this domain.
So I wrote a little software to manage the situation -- just a simple CRUD thing that lets me manage a small personal library, or a small shared library between friends. It's not a "social network for books" or something grand like that. Just a simple self-hosted thing with minimal system requirements. There were some existing solutions, but none that really felt right.
It's published (open source) and has a few users, but I don't think I'll be able to manage it, if it receives a giant burst of attention. On github it's called 'ubiblio'. Perhaps I'll be ready to share it more generally in a few months.
Not sure if it's useful to you, but I hope it is!
Amazon through the kindle is storing massive amounts of data about your reading habits. Statistically, and inevitably, this information will be used against your best interests.
Maybe simply to sell you something you don’t need, to price up your insurance, or as a layup to a precrime you have yet to commit.
If reading privacy matter a kindle isn’t it. Imho.
To me “minimalism” is just a poor excuse for bad design and aesthetic sense, like dressing all black or white to avoid color coordination. It’s easy, but totally devoid of personality and expression.
>from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts, and privacy is something we all value.
I mean you let them into your house, privacy kinda goes out the window when you do that. You can always put books you don't want people to know you read in your bedroom or something.
> I have hesitation in letting people see what I read [...] privacy is something we all value.
Other people are replying to you acting like this is strange, but it's actually something normal people do all the time.
Every politician being interviewed from their home for TV news, every professor recording video lectures, every remote working CEO, and every twitch streamer has considered what is on display behind them.
If I choose shelves as my background, do I want eagle-eyed viewers to see my copies of playboy, my figurines of naked anime ladies, and my copies of the communist manifesto and mein kampf? As a matter of fact I don't.
I get that sentiment, it's not like I would put everything on display indiscriminately.
However, a statement like this "they might glean the nature of your thoughts", strikes me as .. lonely, if nothing else. I want privacy from Facebook and the general public, etc. But people that I invite into my house are people I am going to have conversations with and I want them to know the "real me", whatever that means, or at least a closer approximation of it. I certainly wouldn't want them to think that my political beliefs are something completely different from what they actually are.
How do you get along with communicating to others?
>In a way, you're letting people see the nature of things that you read - from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts
Nobody cares what you think. But if there are state-sponsored actors that do, they have way more insight into your life than the _nature of things that you read_ from physical texts you own. Digital library gives off a much resonant footprint in this regard.
[dead]
It’s a window into your interests, personality
Sure, but so is every interaction with me. Surely the friends you've just invited into your home are already privy to much of this info?
I will not buy DRMed ebooks. I hate the idea that someone can delete a book I bought. Once I have a book, I want to keep it.
I have quite a lot of books that belong to be grandfather, and lots that belonged to my parents. A lot of those will last another generation, maybe more. That does not happen with ebooks either.
I buy books and immediately rip the drm out. They get their money, I get my book.
Where do you live? If you live in the USA you're violating the DMCA, if you live in the EU it is the EUCD which you'll be breaking, elsewhere there may be similar directives. That 'they get their money' does not make any difference here, it is the 'circumvention of technological protection measures' which makes you into a law breaker.
Oh well. I also speed. Call the police.
...one of these is far less damaging than the other!
And you can't sleep after you do too much speed!
woop woop that's the sound of da police lol
wait so buying PDFs isn't possible?
On that note, does anyone have a copy of "The C programing language" (first edition) that isn't falling apart because the acid paper is decaying? I was referring to my copy the other day and it is clear the days I own that book are numbered because of planned obsolesce in the 1970s. I never bought the second edition, but if I did I'm sure it too would be falling apart from age before my likely death.
First edition may be collectible regardless of condition. And as well as newer editions it is resalable. Can you sell an used ebook you bought? How about can you buy an used ebook?
I don't have it because it is collectable. I have it because it is a great book and I still refer to it once in a while. (mostly I can find what I need on the web, but once in a while what K&R really said is important - though mostly for online arguments)
I got a lightly used copy off Amazon, along with "The UNIX programming environment" a year or two ago, probably. They're both fine with only a bit of wear, but I don't think they were ever of a super sturdy binding that would hold up well under heavy abuse.
The binding isn't great, but on my copy the pages themselves are getting brittle. In a few more years if I touch them they will fall to little pieces.
I have a copy of the second edition from 1990, still in good condition (and a finer print job than later editions [1]).
[1] https://boston.conman.org/2002/07/23.1
It is trivially easy to remove DRM with a plugin for Calibre.
Not with the latest encryption. Although you can always screenshot and ocr. Or maybe I've missed something new.
Unless latest means "In the last few months" then no it's still trivial. I buy a lot of "Kindle" books, but I always rip the DRM and make an ebook version I actually use and archive. My attitude is that once I pay for a song/game/book/etc... it's no one's business, but my own how I use it (for myself I mean, obviously uploading it to others is a different issue).
For books from Amazon. Still trivial to remove DRM from Kobo, Google Play, any place that uses Adobe DRM.
I think it's easier with some providers than others. I bought an Amazon ebook that I was really struggling to de-DRM (so I promptly returned it and have only bought books with Adobe DRM since).
It's probably even easier to download them from Z-Library after having bought them on whatever legal platform.
Erm, i have a "friend" that has a few fancy signed physical hard covers that were never opened... because they took their sweet time to arrive so said "friend" downloaded the epub...
Also back in the day when games came on discs, they used to download the no cd crack before opening the shrink wrapped box.
I think we have the same friend. He told me he likes to download a book to get a feel for it… like thumbing through a book in a bookshop. If it’s good, he goes ahead and buys it.
eBooks can be backed up and survive a house fire or a flood, though.
Depends where the house fire or a flood is. If it's in a data center then they might suddenly disappear[1].
[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/ovhcloud-fire...
If only we had more than one datacenter.
> Many believed they had been paying for a reliable service with backups, and were shocked that their data was lost.
You can keep multiple copies in different locations.
Exactly what the provider said.
> Customers were not even compensated for lost data, unless they had paid for backups [which were also lost], with the company saying cloud customers should be handling their own disaster recovery plans.
the challenge is I don't love my books for the content, but for their essence, so ebooks just aren't as valuable. If my physically books were destroyed in a fire I would be sad because i lost the objects, not temporarily lost access to the contents.
For me it's a bit of both. A programming book that I wrote over 10 years ago - the content is long out of date but the weight reminds me of the effort I put into producing it. Then there's my father's library, all 2000 books of it. I've kept about 50, on a wide variety of topics, and I value them both for the unusual content (Ancient churches of Wales; Jazz record catalogs from the 1940s; English artists from the early 20th century) and for the fact that they remind me of him.
> I don't love my books for the content, but for their essence
Curious thing to say. For me it is obvious that the content is the book’s essence.
You can buy an extra copy of the book too!
... But you'll need a second house!
> ... But you'll need a second house!
In another city... Multi-AZ deployment. Standard procedure.
I'm kind of the opposite, I can't bring myself to let go of my collection of paper books, or even to stop buying a new one every so often, but I do not like the physical experience of reading one nearly as much as I like the experience of reading on a phone or kindle. holding a book in one hand and turning a page with a click is a really wonderful way to read.
The standard I arrived at is roughly "would I be sad if, in 15 years, I forgot about this book/piece of music?". If it's something that I enjoyed so much today that I'd be afraid to lose it amongst 10,000's of eBooks or songs on a streaming platform, I physically buy it.
I like this. I do something similar; I ask myself “Am I buying this for the knowledge inside it, or the experience of it?”
I buy the latter. Be it a comic book, photography book, or something else. Those are artistic experiences for me.
Exactly. I've even gone to the trouble of getting ebooks of physical books that I have in some cases. I vastly prefer the size and weight of an e-reader as compared to most books, plus the ability to change the font size to something I can easier read as opposed to the small fonts often chosen by paper books to minimize pages.
> I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
I've long thought the purchase of a book should be considered a licence: you pay a little more if you want a physical version too, but they're not separate things; the digital ebook comes free/is the basic way your licence can be exercised.
(Ideally licenced people would be allowed to order cheap replacements if they damaged the physical copy, but how would you stop fraudulent sale & continual replacement-ordering.)
Have you ever noticed than even after using screens/computers/phones for 12 hours a day, they almost never appear in your dreams when you sleep?
My phone has come up in some dreams. But it seems my dream world can't properly render it cause it's always blurry, but even when I'm doing something specific, it has never, not once, worked the way its supposed to. My dream phones always do about 1 action and then completely stop responding. Then i get confused because i had a specific task in mind that's slowly fading and all i know is this diffusing rectangle in my floating palm is disobeying me. The dream moves on
I have a recurring dream where I'm trying to type something on my phone, and it never comes out right, I delete and try again and again, can't hit the right buttons
It's a security limit in the simulation to help prevent sandbox escape.
There's a "threat simulation theory" that sort of explains it, but it's not 100% correct for everyone. TL;DR: in dreams your brain often seems to practice "threats"/stressful situations. E.g. you're more likely to dream about missing work, having exams, car breaking, running from someone, interacting with someone you care about etc. rather than doing something you're completely used to.
I wonder if very small children dream about screens then don't understand. Like, if a poor small child got hit with the car commercial or the maze jump scare, would that get added to the threat list? I'm talking young enough that they can't tell you it's a screen. Do babies dream? What could they ever dream about? Is there a library of set concepts that we're all genetically made to fear, if so, how would that be represented in dreams? Gosh
Honestly probably yes to all of those. Except for small children the dreams are probably also non-visual like in the case of blind people. They probably dream about "weird feelings" (chills, shivers, cold, heat etc) and smells and sounds and whatnot. The TST also assumes that some of the instincts are inherited from our ancestors (e.g. that uneasy feeling when you walk alone through the forest at night - because for thousands of years predators could kill you in that exact scenario) so a baby's brain might dream about those feelings too (probably without visuals, just chemically induced feeling of uneasyness).
And back to the screen scenario: To the brain "excitement" is also "stressful" from a chemical PoV. So if you really really enjoyed some game (as a kid or whatnot) you probably dreamt about it too.
I have never thought about that!
Even if the last thing going through my head before sleep is related to programming (which is quite often the case), I cannot remember having dreamed of computers, ever.
that's interesting, i don't remember my dreams often but I do remember books and comics - I even distinctly remember being lucid, reading a really good comic - but not my screen work or apps. Perhaps my brain just cannot LLM them convincingly? Are there lucid dreamers that sit behind their dream computers? If so, what are they doing, and do the programs give coherent responses? Are people playing chess or solo card- en boardgames or with dream characters?
you just blew my mind
I understand your pain, we all seem to make dichotomies where none should exist.
Getting rid of print books is not a prerequisite for carrying your entire library with you. Why not both meme.
Hopefully ebooks will get to the point where they offer a better experience than paper books. But my mind does not handle the information in nearly the same way when using ebooks. I find them wonderfully valuable and productive, but in the same deep introspective way. They are transactional, focused and very task directed.
I ebooks better for reading already. Physical books advantage is that I can read inside them in bookstore - bookstores are much better for me when I looking for something new.
But I prefer actual reading on the phone.
Are you reading, or are you studying? When reading my phone is great. When I want to study though I will want to take notes, compare tables on different pages and other such things that my phone doesn't work for.
I actually prefer ebook for both - including for studying. If the book I want to study requires larger screen, I prefer notebook. I never wrote into books, if I am taking notes it is on paper and sometimes electronically (with keyboard).
For comparing tables, I prefer laptop.
> I actually prefer ebook for both - including for studying.
Really?? What ereader do you use? How are you taking notes (that you would be able to retrieve later in a reasonable manner), using the index, etc? I've wanted for years to switch to electronic books for nonfiction that I want to learn from, but software for reading feels so bad for this purpose.
> What ereader do you use?
Fbreader, nothing special.
> How are you taking notes (that you would be able to retrieve later in a reasonable manner), using the index, etc?
It has bookmarks I occasionally use.
I write actual notes either with pen&paper or keyboard into a file on laptop. Retrieval is via ctrl+f or looking at the paper.
My Boox Note Air 3 (non-Color version) runs android, and allows for scribbling on pdf's for notes.
I have a library of work-related books (military). Most of the great ones have no digital alternative. Authors of rare or definitive works know to avoid digital formats. Last year I paid 200+ to get my hands on a newly printed book because i know it will still be relevant on my shelf in 10/20/30 years. After reading it once I may leave it on that shelf for years. One day i will need it again. I will know where to find it no matter what OS i will then be using.
Things like this cannot be bought digitally, nor would most readers want a digital copy. http://www.hisutton.com/pages/Book%20project.html
I cannot champion this guy enough. His website belongs jn the 90s (it needs the "www") but his skills in open source analysis and drawing are unmatched. (He draws in MS paint!)
http://www.hisutton.com/
https://youtu.be/PdKkR_lbLN0
I read all fiction on my Kobo these days. I used to collect paperbacks but they take up a lot of space, especially if you're getting through 20+ books a year. I basically hoard books on my Kobo so I never don't have another book to read.
I do remove the DRM, though. I still want to own books.
But paper is still by far the best format for textbooks. It's not even close.
This sentiment reminds me of an excellent short essay I read in Harper’s a few years back, called “Living Animals.”
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/living-animals/
For similar reasons I went back to physical books.
To add an additional change I noticed. Before I used to be big on reading as much as possible, remember everything. I’d get anxious if I forgot some details.
But now that’s all gone. I’ve learned to slowdown. I enjoy the books more and don’t worry too much about finishing it or remembering everything. I’m now deliberate about building my library. If I forget something I don’t sweat, if it comes back it comes back.
It could also have to do with age and COVID induced reprioritisation; either way I’m more at peace with where I’m about reading. I don’t think I’ll go back to digits books.
And oh now my children and wife know what I’m reading and who knows some shared reading habits could develop.
Same with me.
Another part is I didn’t like my kids seeing me staring at a screen all the time, especially when they were young enough to not get the distinction between eink and lcd.
What’s worse is id be reading all these books and they’d have no idea, even incidentally, what I was reading. Now we’ve probably got 500-600 books on the house and kids are always pulling out something to read.
I still get ebooks sometimes to search for something specific or to feel out a book. I still use my remarkable tablet for papers and things, but my personal library (filled with my personal notes that’ll last my life) is very precious to me.
I got rid of all novels and pop science books. They are fine to read on a kindle and rarely re-read. My physical books are textbooks and reference books (dictionaries, atlases).
I am a mathematician and I used to get a ton of mileage out of Google for research. I got really good at working out likely phrases other researchers would use for concepts that I encountered, and using Boolean operators to filter out pages with similar keywords. I think those days are over sadly. I think we will see a resurgence of personal libraries.
Physical has a spatial dimension that digital cannot replicate. Like I can't tell ya what page something is on but I can find it quickly by feel.
Something is lost by moving to digital but what? By what metric?
Exactly that which is not amenable to metrics...
I have some books from my childhood still, and while I'm not really interested in reading them, my parents and others that gave them to me as gifts made sure to write a note of sorts in the cover. It's a great idea, if you give books as gifts. Make sure it's written in the book itself, not a separate (loseable) postcard or something. Add a date and the occasion.
I love a paper back, but man did I fall in love with ebooks in the last year and a half. I own a Kindle and a Kobo and it's just so incredible for traveling (instead of carrying two books in my backpack) and in bed (the screen backlights are just fantastic).
I absolutely buy certain books physical still, if they're of a certain quality or meaning to me. If Martin Fowler released a new book tomorrow, I'd get it physical. Hell, I might even buy a physical and digital copy.
That said, digital is now my default way to read a book.
I did the exact same thing. I'm back to buying real books, but I will say I still use my ereader in situations without good lighting or where the book is just too cumbersome. Sometimes that means I get the book twice which is suboptimal, but I strongly prefer the reading experience of a physical book. My appreciation of the work is even higher when the reading experience is better.
I agree physical books are great since you can hold them, smell them - nothing like an ebook. There is also a big advantage for us middle-aged folks that ebooks have and that's adjustable font size. Bifocal glasses help bit making font bigger is better.
I like to rent/buy eBooks for the first-time read, and if I like the book, buy the physical version.
Few things are more satisfying to me being able to hand a book off of my shelf to a friend when I think that they would like it, and having them report back they read and liked the book.
I really enjoy audio books much more than reading (perhaps it helps me feed my need to "consume", as I can listen to them while doing other, menial things) but I also enjoy buying the same titles and filling out a physical book shelf.
I love the visual appraisal of a library a lot more in person than on a screen.
I never got hooked on audio books, even back in the "on tape" days. So slow and I have trouble visualizing and immersing myself in them.
The narrator absolutely makes or breaks a book. I find my self more often following narrators versus following authors, which is crazy to say.
If you want to give a narrator a shot, Ray Porter is super solid. Lots of cool sci-fi books out there that he narrates.
I went this route as well, and I've now repopulated many of my favorite books from my youth in physical editions. I wish more physical books were like Goodman Games where any purchase includes a digital download code.
Regretfully, I still prefer generally reading on my Kindle, so I end up buying two copies of the book.
I can relate! A well-bound book is such a perfectly designed thing. A few books on my shelf were printed over 100 years ago, they have a very special weight to them.
Ebooks are also a miracle; a literal library on a microsd is mind-bogglingly amazing.
If I had to choose... I would choose both.
I just love the experience of reading a paper book, especially in trade paperback - which is weird because it's not a great format, but something about the dimensions (as long as the book isn't too long), and the cover and the feel and the paper...
I'd love to have bundles where you can get the physical and ebook at the same time. Going on holiday it is ideal to have an ebook reader to carry many books, but, like you say, there is something precious about having books lined up on shelves to see them.
Yes! A physical book and ebook bundle would be awesome.
It’s also a great practice if you actually wish to own the things you purchase. Same with things like music, movies, games. If it’s just on a cloud platform it will disappear one day.
> Now I have my whole library in Calibre and on my Kindle.
Funnily enough I’m contemplating buying a MiniDisc player since my music listening has gone way down since Spotify came along.
Its like the abdunance of selection is overwhelming.
Yes, I have the same. Why not a simple mp3 player or a portable cd player?
The real question is why did you feel the need to be so extreme? Why couldn't you just do a little digital rather than fully? I don't understand this all or nothing stuff. Live moderately
I personally form the sensory and emotional connection with printed books! Holding a book, feeling its weight, and flipping through its pages...
My wife donated all of her CDs and subsequently started buying the same albums on iTunes. I still don't know why.
Was this recently (say, after 2014?) Try finding a computer with an optical drive today. You need to get an external USB device today, modern cases don’t have external 5-inch bays.
Another problem is all the music apps and services that we’re supposed to use according to the music industry are streaming services: Spotify doesn’t have a CD-player feature; it wouldn’t surprise me if today’s new-computer-user had no idea that CD-ripping was even possible.
It was before 2014 and we still had ways of either playing optical content or ripping the media and storing it ourselves.
I just recently discovered navidrome https://www.navidrome.org
I converted all my old CDs to ogg and installed navidrome on my home server. Basically, now I have my own personal spotify.
I am aware though that this solution won't work for everybody.
Too late, the library has all of the discs now. :-)
She could borrow them all back, one at a time, and re-build the library.
I think it's a brilliant plan! Your wife transfered the cost of ownership to the library :-D
That bothers me less, as finding a device to play CD music is very hard and expensive now.
Also the CDs will degrade in another decade to worthlessness, unlike books
I have a whole drawer full of barely used cdrom drives from decommissioned office PCs to play my audio discs, in case my Philips Player from 1995 is worn down -- didn't even need a repair yet, so no real worries... Additionally the CDs get backuped as FLACs.
I don't see what's "hard" with that approach. Most new releases still get presses as CDs.
Pressed CDs - which most of them are (pressing is much cheaper in quantity) will generally last well. Record able CDs (like you buy from the individual artist won't last much longer.
Either way though I have long since ripped my CDs to my NAS system. I keep the CDs in storage so if someone says copyright I can prove fair use as I still own the media.
what do you feel about the inability to move easily with a large library? ebooks + printer seems like a nice compromise
but kind of moot if you are settled in life are not a desperado nomad of sorts
I'm an avid reader. But about maybe 15 years ago, I stopped buying printed books because I felt guilty - they took up too much space, and it was running scarce. And surely ebooks were superior - no space wasted, I could take an entire library with me, etc. It was just a matter of getting used to them, and abandoning the impractical romanticism of fetishizing the printed page.
At that time, I pretty much stopped reading. Now it's obvious why that happened, but at that point I didn't really connect the dots. I thought that I ran into a bad streak of books that just didn't hook me much, and then I was very busy, I always seemed to have something else to do rather than continue reading. So for those hypothetical reasons I went from reading several books per month to one per year, or even less.
At some point, I read a printed book and it hooked me like in the old times. And then, it dawned on me that the books being bad, or me being busy, were just excuses. The real reason is that I didn't like electronic reading. I wasn't proud of this. It wasn't a rational attitude. Electronic reading was clearly superior (less space, more flexibility and so on), and the content was exactly the same. I was actually quite ashamed of myself: was I such a shallow person that I didn't appreciate the contents of the literature enough to abstract away from purely materialistic concerns? What kind of person can't appreciate culture or art just because they don't like the medium used to transmit it? But be that as it may, the plain truth was that ebooks didn't hook me, and physical books did, so I admitted it and started buying printed books again. And once again, I'm an avid reader.
In the last few years, papers and studies have started to appear saying that with paper reading we retain more, we concentrate more, we learn more, etc... so I have started to reconcile with myself. Maybe I'm not a shallow materialistic asshole after all, and it's just human nature.
It's weird, but I find myself abandoning ebooks much easier than printed books. It's actually very rare that I abandon a printed book, but very common that I put off finishing an ebook.
I wonder why. What you say rings true.
As silly as it sounds, my emotional connection to ebooks is somehow weaker.
I'm jojoing on this for at least 15 years at this point. I really appreciate the physical experience of real books, the smell, the weight, just as you describe it. At the same time I really despise the storage space they take up, collecting dust, never to be touched again. So I go full digital for a while and read books on my Scribe. I get decision paralysis really quickly because of all the content available at a finger press, but the note taking and accessibility of it all are really nice. But after a while I grow tired of this and buy some hardcover books again and really enjoy that.
This cycle has been repeating for me for a long time, I wonder if I'll find a good balance eventually. My current approach is to try and read more technical stuff digital while keeping novels, the humanities, history as paperback, we'll see.
How do you find time to read?
you could learn bookbinding and print out your annotated books. i feel like it would be a nice hobby.
I definitely agree that just giving kids a laptop/chromebook instead of books is not working. My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That said, one thing I appreciate is that she doesn't have to lug around 30lb backpacks like kids did when I was a child. We had lockers, but realistically they didn't provide adequate time to utilize them, so everyone just carried around all their books for the day. Most of us hunched forward because of the weight.
It seems like something like a dumb ereader would be a good middle ground? Put all the textbooks into one place, but don't give it the ability to do anything but read? That or keep the textbooks in the classroom and share.
Physical books are still better than e-readers because you can put sticky notes on the pages, jump back and forth between pages quickly, and even start to know where pages are simply based on how many leaves/pages are split between your left and right hand. Textbooks are basically reference books, my favorite dictionaries I start to "learn by hand" to know where to flip to approximately to start my search.
On the one hand, yes, I agree. There's something about the tactility of a book, about dogeared pages, and marginalia, and having muscle memory to open a book at about the same spot where I left off.
I grew up with that and it's a very comfortable skill set.
On the other hand, I've learned ways to manage and reference information in digital formats. Bookmarks and links and pasted snippets. Attachments and full text search. Not to even get into real sicko stuff like Notion and Obsidian and DEVONthink.
Being able to easily flip back and forth between pages is a very useful technique, but so is being able to snap a screenshot of a pdf and keep it open it in another window.
I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
>I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
This, I'm really comfortable with technology, but I feel like a boomer when I watch kids that have grown up with it their entire lives. Some people don't need the ability to cross reference things much, but folks who do develop the skills the need without having to revert to printed material.
I'd agree except for the ability to search in an e-book. There's nothing worse than knowing the textbook in front of you contains the answer you need but not remembering which of the 1500 pages contains it. Being able to CTRL-F saved me hours of time when I went back to school after e-books became common.
For a current project, I've been using a physical book as a reference manual for the API I'm working with rather than using the more typical internet search for the function name. And it's actually somewhat surprising how efficient a physical book is!
Sure, there's a lot of efficiency to Ctrl-F a text string and just find all the places in a document. I won't deny that it takes me longer to pull up the index, search for the function name in the index, then flip to the page. But then I can just leave the book open at that page on the desk (or my lap). I never have to Alt-Tab, or fiddle with the location of windows to switch between looking at documentation and looking at the code I'm working on.
This difference was more stark when I was trying to close-read a different specification to ensure that I understood it well enough to make sure a PR implemented it correctly. I needed to have three different parts of the specification open simultaneously to bounce between all of them. With physical paper, that's just a swish of a hand away. With a PDF reader, well, goto that other section, scroll down to the piece I wanted, now goto the first section again and scroll down again and wait what was that back thing again goto and scroll and scroll and goto and descent into insanity. Trying to use multiple windows ameliorates the problem somewhat, but it also takes an inordinate amount of time to set the view up correctly, and I often end up running into the "focus doesn't follow the eye gaze" problem of typing in the wrong window and ruining the view.
>With a PDF reader, well, goto that other section, scroll down to the piece I wanted, now goto the first section again and scroll down again and wait what was that back thing again goto and scroll and scroll and goto and descent into insanity.
I pretty much just use screenshots in snagit for that stuff.
A decent index solves that just fine. And usually outpaces ctrl-f chasing for a given word, because it's indexing by ideas, not words. (If it's a decent index, that is :)
That not how indices work. It is by person or subject not "idea". You can do the same thing but better with a "ctrl-f" search.
Good indices are built atop a taxonomy that is then used extensively to list related taxonomic terms. This will give you direct hierarchical terms (loosely maps to what I guess you refer to as by subject) but also related terms. A good indexer will also exercise judgement and check with the author if certain terms are related and in what way.
Let me give you an example of a high-quality index entry from the Software Architecture in Practice (Bass et al. 2021) [1]:
Availability
analytic model space, 259
analyzing, 255–259
broker pattern, 240
calculations, 259
CAP theorem, 523
CIA approach, 147
cloud, 521
design checklist, 96–98
detect faults tactic, 87–91
general scenario, 85–86
introduction, 79–81
planning for failure, 82–85
prevent faults tactic, 94–95
recover-from-faults tactics, 91–94
summary, 98–99
tactics overview, 87
As you see, it lists a number of taxonomic terms that are merely related to each other and you might not think about Ctrl+F-ing for them unless you already want to search for them. You may come to this entry knowing about CAP and navigate away to analytic model space, 259.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14786083-software-archit...
Not really. An index is also a list of ideas you should search for. Search for a synonym and control-f fails, but the index will have a "see also" for that, or worst case lets you scan for interesting words without reading the whole book. The index will also leave out all the places where a word happens to be used but are not useful to someone searching for the term.
Of course a good index is hard (read expensive) to write and so many books didn't have good indexes.
I got "A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?" for Christmas, by the Weinersmiths.
The index is so good I've shared my happiness about it several times.
If your PDF has a traditional index in it, you can read it then jump to the right page.
If, and that's one huge if, the PDF is structured so that you can do that.
Some are. Far, far, far, far, far too many aren't.
The half-assedry of PDF creation is a major frustration.
You mean like page 20 in the PDF isn't "page 20" in the index? Unless the pages are out of order or extra stuff is inserted, you should be able to simply add an offset. Or worst case, you binary-search the PDF like you would with a book.
There are various permutations.
There are scanned-in books whose index pages don't precisely match the digital pages. Good PDFs will account for that offset themselves, but manual recalculation may be necessary.
Worse are books half-assedly converted from print to digital. These often include an index (useful for all the reasons others have mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but the "faithful" reproduction of the print text means that the page enumeration in the index bears a nonconstant relationship to the digital text. The offsets are not constant.
Then there are ePubs with the above feature. The sane thing to do would be to link the index entry to occurances. Often you'll find, again, print-edition page mentions which are of little use in locating the passage within your digital edition.
One of the underlying problems is that the print notion of "page" is increasingly archaic. For languages / typographies in which paragraphs are a useful convention, paragraph numbering might be preferable (this should be constant across formats). Direct symlinks are of course useful, but these conceal information revealed in a conventional (print) index such as passages where a topic is discussed at some length, or clusters of appearances, as well as cross-references or associated references which a well-constructed index will reveal.
I can't remember examples like those, but one I deal with is where the index has a different kind of numbering scheme like "E403.1-a". But at least cmd+f maybe works in that case, unless of course that string shows up everywhere.
Technical / government docs often feature such numbering schemes. I believe part of the history is that those documents were often composed in segments or sections, often by independent teams, such that a fixed page enumeration wasn't readily available and/or would change frequently.
There's a pre-digital publishing trend of loose-leaf or removeable bindings, with publications prepared in sections or with periodic supplements, which began in the late 19th / early 20th century. Those would typically be organised and numbered by section. The concept is somewhat trite now, but I think of it as a significant stage and evolution of publishing, somewhere between fixed-format codices, periodicals, and eventually databases and wikis.
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about book indexes being downvoted. In professional publishing houses, indexing is a job done by a qualified indexer and is not as trivial as one may think [1]. Some rather important reading guides [2] recommend to judge a book by its Contents and Index, which are often overlooked in books that were not edited by professionals or were edited in haste.
[1]: https://abookindexer.com/why-use-a-qualified-indexer/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about farriers being downvoted. In professional blacksmith shops, horse shoeing is a job done by a qualified farrier and not as trivial as one may think.
Not quite. Not a big fan of analogies of questionable fit, but let's try:
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about importance of horse shoes being downvoted. In professional blacksmith shops, horse shoeing is a job done by a qualified farrier and not as trivial as one may think. The importance of horseshoeing for horse wellbeing is also highlighted in certain key equestrian literature.
My high school was mainly textbooks, then things were more digital in college. Normally I'm against fancy new tech, but this felt like an improvement in hindsight. I was never missing the book I needed, there's cmd+f and page skip, I can annotate without ruining it...
The real problem seems to be licensing. Lots of books are physical-only, and the digital versions are those annoying "epub" files instead of PDFs.
Aren't PDFs a relic of the past, when you wanted to print digital documents on paper?
Epubs can be reflowed to fit any screen. If done properly at least. For PDFs you basically need an A4/letter screen to read them comfortably.
Idk, unless I'm using a very unusual aspect ratio, it hasn't been an issue. The only real difference I've noticed with epubs is I can't just open it in Preview or the iPhone PDF viewer like normal. And it may have DRM.
Yes and no.
PDF's work well for a sufficiently large e-book reader. Full-sized isn't essential, though I find the 13.3" display I use is quite pleasant to read --- roughly equivalent to a large iMac Retina display for reading ease (less overall real estate, but more comfortable to hold in one's hands, and of course, read under bright light / direct sunlight), and vastly superior to a typical smartphone.
Smaller displays of 8--10" should work in most cases and are far more affordable. The exceptions are typically scans from print, especially of small-font and tightly-rendered journal articles, or works with extensive graphics and diagrams. Those with young eyes can probably manage better than the olds.
ePub fits any sized display, but there are times when fixed layout truly is preferable for reading, context, understanding, and juxtaposition of text and graphics, etc. With a fixed layout and a competent layout engine or editor this can be optimised. With a flexible layout* (HTML, ePub, etc.) the dynamic element pretty much always leads to compromises or gaffes in layout and positioning.
Fixed-layout also means that spatial memory of where within a document, chapter, and/or page specific elements / contents are. Dynamic layout greatly reduces the ability of those who have strong spatial memory of written materials.
Yeah, there's a reason why Word docs etc all used fixed layouts. Easy to underestimate the complexity of a reactive layout. Even modern websites usually make some assumptions, hence separate desktop and mobile versions.
My understanding is that MS Word's layout (as with some other word-processing software) was strongly dependent on the print drivers installed. So there still was some variability in output.
I tend to prefer LaTeX or a similar doc-prep system myself for authoring.
>Physical books are still better than e-readers because you can put sticky notes on the pages, jump back and forth between pages quickly, and even start to know where pages are simply based on how many leaves/pages are split between your left and right hand.
Only because you prefer to work that way, someone that has grown up with everything digital has equivalent skills doing that stuff using tabs, digital sticky notes, bookmarks, and such.
Many of the beneficial affordances you mention that are available for print but not in ebooks is partly because ebook technology is kind of bad. Navigation and annotation for example could be much better in ebooks if developers put more care into those ergonomics.
My sister that's studying medicine says that her books would be totally ruined in half a year if she used them like she uses the virtual ones.
The same is true for my students (german school system, iPads form 7th to 13th grade): They are marking, annotating and rearranging parts of the digitized pages as they like. It would be impossible with printed books. (ok, they could take a picture with the camera and do the same) They have/use printed books but most of the students are borrowing them from the school and are not allowed to write in them.
So I use mostly digital material and most of the books stay at home for studying (the books are heavy).
How does she use the virtual ones?
Ndr42 said it better than I could.
encoded
> jump back and forth between pages quickly
You can't do it quickly. Jumping between random pages isn't useful (and not faster than in an ebook), so you want to jump to a specific page, and here ebook is much faster, whether you're opening a page number or a page with some content you remember
> know where to flip to approximately to start my search.
Or you can start precisely with an ebook
With the use of bookmarks (prepared or improvised with index cards, etc.) or sticky notes, precision jumping within a physical book is very quick, easy, and useful.
Of course it's not, you can't fit all the words in a book on index cards, you can't fit all the appearances of a given character in a story, all the memorable highlights- all trivially done at scale in a digital book. You can't jump from the index at the end to the required 5 pages where this term appears at the speed of a click
And then your highlights also can't unstick because there is some dirt that ruined the stickiness of a note. And your carefully prepared unsticky bookmarks (you didn't have sticky notes around, so you've followed your advice and improvised) can't all fall out just because your book fell with its back up
I'm not claiming that physical books have all the properties of digital ones, or vice versa.
But there are reasonable affordances to a practical extent within both formats.
I have a large print collection, and a much larger digital one, presently largely on an Onyx BOOX ebook reader. I'm well acquainted with the capabilities and limitations on both systems.
(I've discussed the BOOX device fairly extensively in previous HN comments for those interested.)
Reasonable affordance is fine, that's not what I was arguing against (nor you), but the obvious downside of flipping pages: it's not "very quick, easy" (especially in those huge dictionaries!)
That's where tabbed thumb cuts / index notches are useful:
<https://cool.culturalheritage.org/don/dt/dt3508.html>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index>
Image: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index#/media/File:Blacks...>
Those may be cut in, or self-applied as with index tabs:
The entire notion of a tabbed interface in the computer sense derives from index tabs:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)>
They are useful, but relatively bad: you realize there can be book-width worth of pages within a single letter in a dictionary? So all you've done is produced a regular book without any thumb navigation, so none of the physical virtues will help you find the specific word fast
Besides, these are impossible to implement for anything dynamic, so they aren't even useful at all in most of the cases
If you're seeking a specific word, looking that up is a skill which can be trained and developed. Hint: binary search.
If you're referencing between two or more sections of a book, bookmarks, index cards, stickies, tabs, etc., are all there for you.
Source: old school printed book research.
I personally never used any of these things back when I was a student
My high school doesn't use entire textbooks; it uses either excerpts from a textbook or lecture notes produced by the teacher. This solves the 30lb backpack problem nicely: you realistically only bring the necessary notes or textbook required for the last few days of instruction. Anything that's earlier gets left behind at home because you won't need to refer to it often.
Interesting. This is actually a pretty nice middleground. If books were designed more like a binder of notebooks, perhaps by chapter, it would solve the weight issue while still allowing for all the things people love about paper books.
These days some textbooks are available as loose leaf textbooks too.
We did this in high school. I kept forgetting what I had to bring for all my textbook-based classes each day or what I had to bring home, so I simply carried ~50lb of stuff everywhere. That's ok cause I got swol. Some kids said this was dumb, but they forgot stuff too.
How do they handle copyright?
The teachers produced most of the lecture notes. The textbooks excerpts were short and in hindsight must be covered by fair use.
Statutory exemption for face-to-face education (this is separate from fair use)?
Heavy backpacks full of textbooks are an American style of education. There are other options between huge textbooks and laptops.
Carrying weight from books is good for you. Takes care of your physical fitness and mental fitness.
If the bag is too heavy (especially if unbalanced, like carrying it on one shoulder) then the kid can cause back problems.
See https://scoliosisinstitute.com/heavy-backpacks/ for more details.
There is no excuse for schools being so badly organized that this is a problem. It certainly was not a problem when I was at school in the '60s and early '70s. All the books I needed fitted in a briefcase. It also was not a big problem for my children going to school in Norway between 1990 and 2015.
But children should also be taught how to carry backpacks properly, not unbalanced on one shoulder.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But given silisili's lived experience of dealing with 30lb backpacks, chrisco255's statement about that being 'good for you' is simply not correct, unless perhaps that kid is a high school football player weighing 200+ lbs.
Also, only nerds and dweebs use both shoulder straps.
Rather, I don't think it's a simple matter of education, given that there are also social pressures involved.
To a degree. I was tiny in school, always smallest kid in my grade, and lugging 30 pounds of books around every day means I now have scoliosis.
>and lugging 30 pounds of books around every day means I now have scoliosis.
Doctors claim that heavy backpacks don't cause scoliosis, but can make the associated back pain worse.
I would call it "schooliosis" if I were you.
>I definitely agree that just giving kids a laptop/chromebook instead of books is not working.
I'm not really sure why people are pretending it's an either/or situation. Plenty of things are taught just fine or better with technology, but books still have a purpose.
>My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That stuff is usually blocked or limited on school owned laptops. If it's not your child's school is failing at something that is very basic.
I was talking to my ten-year-old about some recent event and came to ask him how he'd learned about it. "Oh, I often check the news in school at the the beginning of class". I hadn't realized just how far the use of laptops had reached in his school. Putting distractions like that between a young child and the things we want them to study is insane, if you ask me.
Have you ever tried using e-reader? It's slow as hell. Slow in turning the pages, slow in rendering anything that is not text. Making notes functionality is a disaster. Sure, you can search through text, but if it's PDF or images, you are screwed.
My advisor used a reMarkable 2 and loved it. I think that there is a range of quality available.
Amen. My son's backpack is light as a feather.
I remember carrying my bag full, and still carrying books and notebooks in my arms. It was horrible and I'd end up digging through them to find things, not need it all ... not fun or efficient.
Although I do agree that the idea of making a dumb ereader that is specifically tailored to the educational environment sounds like a cool hacking project, there's a much simpler approach that basically solves 90% of the problems: just take the WiFi card out!
The problem here is not with electronic textbooks per se, but the pervasive adoption of networked applications for school assignments — which in turn is used to decrease grading time so that schools can shove more students onto a single teacher.
This always seemed like a bad idea to me. I got done high school right before laptops were provided in schools all over the place. I never had one.
Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things? I figured they would be super restricted.
> Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things?
Where there's a will, there's a way.
I think the actual interest is in playing games. (IO games, Minecraft online, etc.)
By the time they are old enough to be into social media (14+ years?), most here in the US have their own phones to provide internet access.
Nowhere did they mention social media :-) but emails and Teams work just fine - though one of my students mentioned they can't initiate chats. I'm sure there's workarounds. I just keep my students off laptops as much as possible.
Blocking games websites is like playing whack-a-mole. Our IT dept took all of our Year 7 and 8 students out two classes at a time, installing software or doing something to block a raft of websites.
They were back playing Retrobowl etc a day later. It was pretty funny.
Depends on the school. Some are super locked down, and some don't seem to care at all.
But kids are kids. For example, mine and her friends are using a shared Google slides to drop memes and chat amongst themselves. They always find a way :).
In my experience, when the kids had iPads or Chromebooks all their traffic was routed through the school network and a web filer.
Yeah you could in theory get around it and kids did (generally to play minecraft), but social media was generally well blocked, and all traffic monitored. It is made very clear that these devices are NOT personal devices for personal activity / they're monitoring them.
In Sweden kids get their own desk where their books are stores, as can be seen in the picture of the article.
The only lugging around is for homework.
Going away from physical book-based learning was possibly well intentioned (but I have my doubts)... but it was really dumb.
There are clear studies that show reading a physical book (versus a screen) and using and physical pen or pencil on a piece of paper, versus typing or drawing on a screen, leads to higher comprehension and retention of information... and thus much better overall learning outcomes. This doesn't even consider the fact that youtube, discord, and a bunch of other apps are a swipe away on an iPad.
A common solution to the "carrying books around problem" used to be there was the copy you were issued (and mostly stayed at home) and there was a shared classroom copy.
Carrying around 2-3 books plus a binder is not a big deal (and is not a 30lb backpack... more like 10-15 lbs)... we act like this is some sort of massive hardship yet so many of us did this for over a decade of our childhood with no ill effect.
And yet we want kids to get exercise in some way... When I was a kid we walked to and from school with 40lb packs, uphill. Both ways.
The 30lb backpacks were only a function of our deranged society, economy, and government. I am sure others here will be able to attest that education in Europe not only was better for reasons that cannot be openly discussed in our censorious society, but the textbooks were denser with information that was also better structured, while also being lighter in weight. Lockers are simply not even a thing in Europe because children are carrying less and they have standardized backpacks.
We had lockers in the European high school that I went to. As I recall it was not allowed to bring backpacks into the classroom, you were supposed to only bring the relevant items to each class and keep the rest in your locker.
I don't think the combined weight of all books used in an entire semester would add up to 30lb, maybe if including dictionaries and atlases and other reference litteraturen that was kept in each classroom (or carted around on trollies by the teachers).
You are conflating things, and then also making my argument, but are unnecessarily cantankerous so you just want to argue. Are you a Brit by any chance?
Have you ever seen the school books that Americans had to carry around? They were/are 2"/5cm thick books, weigh a few pounds each, and kids carried around about 6-8 per semester.
You made my point in that European school books are a lot less heavy and also less physically voluminous. The theory behind American books being that more spacing and less information per page makes learning easier, even though all the evidence clearly indicates that is very likely inaccurate.
Even though you are clearly one of those necessarily contrarian types for reasons that are your own, my point still stands that even if you had lockers for other reasons, the fact that school books in most European countries in which I have visited schools, utilize books that are a lot less heavy and are more information dense and can easily be carried around.
What is it with you types that you latch onto meaningless and nonsense things like that you did have lockers, while totally missing the core of the point, that the argument was about the weight and size of books??? That sounds like something you may want to think about.
I'm not sure which European country you're thinking about, but we had lockers, individual backpacks and heavy textbooks. I never used my locker because we didn't have enough time between lessons, so I just carried all my heavy textbooks for the day as did most people.
> education in Europe not only was better for reasons that cannot be openly discussed in our censorious society
Huh?
I would explain it to you, but there are topics that simply cannot be discussed, regardless of how correct, important, and critical they are. I may as well try to tell you about the heliocentric model in the 17th century.
It's certainly up to you, but "my ideas are as important as the heliocentric model, but humanity is so far behind me that I can't even tell you about them" does not speak favorably about your ideas. (Not to mention that it's hard to imagine that the consequences for whatever your heresy is several posts deep in an anonymous HN comment thread would be anything worse than a few downvotes.)
I'm unclear if this is a real article.
It claims to be published in 2025 but it refers to 2022-2025 in the future tense.
> [...] Sweden’s putting 104 million euros into bringing books back into classrooms from 2022 to 2025
See the comment identifying a legitimate source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716448
Plus 104 million euros seems like a normal amount of money to spend updating the curriculum for an entire country. This is likely just updating the curriculum over a few years from older books to newer ones and basically unrelated to the divide between laptops and printed books.
Scandinavian countries went very hardcore digital for a while, giving all kids iPads and Laptops, and getting rid of all physical books. This sounds like a strong reversal, and I hope the other Scandinavian countries will learn some lessons from this.
One belief I have is that a major lifehack in a digital world is making things as physical as possible.
Spend all day at a computer? Get a mechanical keyboard so every keystroke is satisfying.
Learn keyboard shortcuts so you're on the mouse less.
Find yourself frequently turning something on/off via your phone? Get a physical button and map it -- e.g. physical volume knob
Gotta mock something up or understand a codebase? Physical draw it in a notebook
Got a dense book to read? Buy the print copy and go somewhere without a phone
Obviously costs more money and space, but anything I can offload to a 'spatial' part of my brain is welcome these days
My eldest doesn't like the computers they have in grade 2 (in Sweden). He thinks the things installed on them are too boring and easy. He would rather read books.
Thing is, the school doesn't have a staff librarian any more. As I understand it, they got rid of that position as part of the cost shifting to switch to digital.
This is so upsetting to hear. The librarians at my school are amazing. The students don't know how good they have it, but us teachers certainly do.
My sister is a librarian in Sweden and used to work in schools. She was very upset by this. Fortunately, the government is backpedaling and bringing them back[1]
1: https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/06/nu-ska-al...
I weep a little inside every time I pass the unstaffed school library.
To support paper-digital integration, we created https://www.smartpaperapp.com/
It’s not special paper—it’s just a computer vision system to help teacher easily convert student work on paper to digital marks. The state of Rajasthan in India uses this product to assess math and literacy for 5 million students each year.
At a personal level, I’m frustrated by son’s school that uses a digital LMS to have teachers assign jpgs of pages of the books. I find it hard to help him because I don’t know what he has done and what he will do—something that a book makes natural. At the same time, I’m a fan of cognitive tutors and other digital instructional materials. Balance is good!
I "discovered" libraries. They are cool! They usually offer more services than just books. But you have plenty of books that you don't need to keep after having read them, and the trip to the library is like a discovery journey.
Even more, my library also has comics and comic books. These are usually quite expensive, and now I can just read them for free.
I recently learned that my library has 3D printers for anyone to use, and microfilm of local newspapers going back to 1797; it really is incredible what you can discover in them!
One interview question I like to give for software engineering candidates at my company is "rough out the model for an online library, where users can check out up to three books, they will be charged for overdue books" etc.
Recently I had a candidate who essentially had no idea what I was talking about. They had never checked out a book from a library.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I still was.
If a candidate comments that libraries are getting rid of overdue fines as research has found it's not effective at getting books back in time, while negatively affecting their poorest members, and that libraries which got rid of fines found it "has raised circulation numbers, brought lapsed users back to the library, and boosted goodwill" (quoting https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/the-end-of-fines ) - would that improve or worsen their changes of employment with you?
Are you looking for someone who will follow orders, or looking for someone who will challenge them?
I suspect no one has brought it up, but wonder if any have decided to not bring it up for worry that a challenge would risk their chance of being hired.
It would neither improve nor worsen their chances. I'm only looking for their ability to model a software application.
I wouldn't see it as a challenge, as it has nothing to do with the task at hand. If they said "I don't want to do this exercise, because I don't believe in library fines," that might hurt their chances.
My comment was more about being surprised that they had never checked out a book from a library, since I thought that was a fairly universal experience, at least for software engineers, but going forward I don't think I'll assume that.
I think books are the best medium for learning some things, and probably in some aspects for writing.
However I'm worried some countries seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are many things that are easier to learn with computers/screens than without as well, they just need to fit the medium. [0]
Intended as a reply, but the comment got deleted, so I might as well include it here:
The article [0] is focused on homeschooling, so the exact points listed there doesn't necessarily have a leg up on traditional media (implying you're in the right environment to facilitate learning these skills well without computers, which I don't think most kids are).
One off-hand example [where screens can be better than a book], would probably be using simulations to assist in learning physics, instead of just solving the equation on a page. Things where interactivity sets the learning in better context than a book probably would.
I'm also very excited to try teaching our child math using apps like DragonBox, which seems to allow for much easier visualization of how to solve equations than I got at school. [1]
0: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2024-10-29-screen-time/
1: https://dragonbox.com/products/algebra-5
I read a lot of books while being at primary and secondary school and most of my colleagues didn't, they had other things to do. Now I read on Kindle and others watch Netflix or scroll Facebook. Form of the book is not a root cause of the problem.
Kudos to Sweden for responding to research.
[dead]
Speaking of school, I find it disturbing that many schools switch to pure digital, i-ready and that some similar shit. The problem with pure digital is that the kids won't learn how to communicate math, like writing down step-by-step solutions to word problems in elementary schools, rigorous geometry proofs in grade 7, and algebraic derivations and proofs after grade 7. Those kind of work was natural to my generation when we grew up - it's just what our teachers trained us to do. And now it's a uphill battle to help my kids even understand the importance of doing proper maths.
A general theme, though, is that I don't get why it's so hard for Americans to stick to the traditional but good practices, like getting rigorous training in STEM, like not solely relying on multiple choices, like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, etc and etc.
The school districts have all kinds of conflicting incentives and priorities. Someone is telling them "go digital, it's the future! Kids have to learn to use technology!" Now folks are telling them "but the kids don't learn well with laptops! Go back to books!" So are they going to abandon the sizable investment they made in getting every kid a Chromebook?
> like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones There are these things called unions...
This shows how thoughtful our politicians are, they're shooting from the hip at best. It's just dumb luck we haven't fucked up more than we have, and that we have natural resources to lean on (Iron, wood, water).
Everything is over budget, nobody is accountable and psychological wellbeing is way down the drain.
My point being that politicians were going "ooh computers are good, let's slap a computer onto everything", but then only where they can bikeshed computers into the system as it seems easy at first (education). But without national guidelines to make it good, and no guidelines for medical IT and friends. It seems like Estonia "did computers right" more than Sweden.
Apart from learning I'd also like to see more research into the effect switching to digital devices had on tactile skills. I used to mentor at a makerspace a few years ago and at least anecdotally, younger people seemed to have what we in Germany call "two left hands" (don't know if that's an English idiom too).
At least to me it seemed like there's a real loss of fine motor skills. Digital devices are pretty impoverished interfaces. Even if I compare my own handwriting to my parents, who learned cursive more seriously and wrote more by hand I feel like my penmanship is just worse.
> I feel like my penmanship is just worse.
You cannot learn everything. Is good penmanship worth spending time on? What are the other options. What if I gave you (8 year old you, your parents when you were 8, and you today - I want all 3 answers) a choice: you can learn cursive, piano, or go out to the playground. What is the best use of your time? My parents would have selected cursive, but on hindsight I can say it was a waste of my time. I always wished I could play piano (this is why I put piano in the list - there are millions of other options you can teach a 8 year old that we do not), but playground time is also valuable and would have appealed to me as a kid.
Sure fair enough, I wasn't trying to narrowly hone in on writing, if you want to make the case for more instrumental education I'm on board with that too. And someone recently actually asked me "where have all the high school bands gone?". It seems like (passive) digital entertainment is eating into all of these activities.
I'm just broadly in favor of incorporating physical development, because who knows what it does to your brain if all you do is push buttons on a screen, as I said anecdotally I don't think anything good. The easy thing to writing about me is that you can basically incorporate it for free. People learning Kanji or math on paper, for one is likely better for retention but also even cheaper practically. As far as I can tell buying students tablets just cost a bunch of money.
> You cannot learn everything. Is good penmanship worth spending time on?
There are some really good arguments that penmanship (actually, any fine motor skill) ultimately improves intellectual capacity.
Maybe, though when I read those critically I suspect that it is more just time spent on something. Hunting rabbits with a sling requires fine motor skills as well, is that good enough (This is the most primitive, 'uneducated' task I can think of at the moment - there are plenty of others). How does learning violin compare? There are plenty of other possibilities that those arguments don't adequately address.
No, hunting rabbits doesn't require fine motor skills (coordination between fingers and eyes).
> How does learning violin compare?
I don't think it is, although music seems to offer its own advantages. Apparently, playing console games on a controller might also qualify.
One aspect to this IMO is the difference in maturity between pencils and paper + books and chromebooks/ipads with software.
Pencil/Paper/Book is extremely mature and the teaching system knows how to use it extremely well. The tools just work and don't distract from learning.
My kid has a Chromebook + Google classroom and it's just a distracting mess of poor hardware and horrific software. Just bad all around the teachers even say it wastes a ton of their time.
Anyone working in tech has a skewed view because we always have excellent hardware and software because of the amount of money the industry has and the way the industry knows that spending on tools pays back in a huge way. None of that applies to schools.
It blows me away that my son got a 2024 Chromebook and the screen is about what I had on my work laptop 20 years ago. But 20 years ago all the software was designed to work on a screen that was sub-1080p, today all the Google software seems to be designed for a 27" 4k screen.
I have always preferred physical books to digital ones.
Is cursive (hand) writing still taught?
The province of Ontario brought it back in the curriculum for example:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...
It is a political thing as much as anything. Some old people feel they learned it so it must be good and therefore kids today must learn it. Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not. Nor are we asking if maybe the skill is obsolete and not worth learning. Or maybe it is a niche skill that most won't need and we are better off spending time with something else (like going to the playground). There are probably other good points to debate as well, but generally it comes down to old people teaching what they learned.
I do come down against teaching it. But then I never could read my own writing and am mad about all the trouble I got into in school for it (I have to credit the one teacher who did realize I wasn't lazy and tried to get experts to help me - but dysgraphia wouldn't exist for several more years so nothing came of his attempt). However I'm not clear if manual writing is obsolete for everyone or just me. Right note typing is a useful skill, but text to speech is making progress so maybe in a few years nobody will type and so teaching that skill was wasted.
My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used. A complete waste of time that I never used again. Anyone care to guess what will be useful or not?
> It is a political thing as much as anything. Some old people feel they learned it so it must be good and therefore kids today must learn it.
Some evidence to indicate it is useful:
* https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-athletes-way/202...
Maybe, or is that another thing that belongs to the replication crisis? Is it just cursive or is regular printing good enough? Is it hand writing or would learning to hunt with a sling also work? That article should bring a lot of questions of validity to mind and thus reasons to question if it is real or not. (of course the article is not the preponderance for scientific studies which I don't have access to)
Oh. My. God.
I had no idea that there was a term for my awful handwriting; I think I have dysgraphia, at least based on the Wikipedia-level reading I just did after reading your post. My handwriting isn't quite as inconsistent as the example on Wikipedia, but it's pretty close.
In fourth grade, my teacher called me aside and told me that I need to improve my handwriting or it would really hurt my career prospects. She wasn't being mean, her heart was in the right place, but no matter how hard I tried I was never able to significantly improve my handwriting.
Fortunately my fourth grade teacher was wrong, and I learned how to touch-type when I was fourteen, and I type pretty fast now, to a point where, outside of signing forms, I am not sure the last time I actually wrote something with a pen and paper...2021 I think?
> My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used.
I'm not sure which version of WordPerfect you used, but at least from the mid-90's and onward, a lot of those skills would transfer relatively well to Microsoft Word wouldn't they? I remembered WordPerfect being pretty similar to Office 2003.
> Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not.
I mean, i think feneyman did have something to say about if it was better or not, and why.
Lots of people weighed in. The vast majority knew nothing about how kids learn or what is valuable. (this is on both sides of the debate, and there of course has been a lot of advancement in education in the 50-60 years since)
What is new math
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math
My 2 cents, valid criticisms of new math are _vastly_ outnumbered by ones more in the form of "I wasn't taught that way and so my kids shouldn't be either" / any change is bad change type thinking. There is a lot of overlap in these criticisms with common core ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core ) which isn't particularly related.
Interestingly enough, at least some computer pioneers credited a part of their success to the New Math.
Apparently, learning to do arithmetic in other bases helps with computer programming. Who knew.
My parents did New Math, and I always thought it sounded pretty cool.
My elementary school math pretty much completely boiled down to doing arithmetic. A useful thing to know, obviously, but I always felt too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
It always seemed like planting the seeds of some more advanced math concepts would make math a lot more approachable.
> too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
I felt the same for a while. Until I realized my college math problems were all selected to make the arithmetic easy. Thus by doing all the arithmetic in my head I had a quick cheat on if I was right or not - wrong answers made for hard math and so I'd start over and thus fix the mistake.
The trick only worked for math though. Physics and chemistry often required harder math and so a calculator was needed to finish on time even when you did the problem right (which wasn't always a given)
I'm not saying that we stop teaching arithmetic, and I'm not even saying that we stop spending a majority of our time on teaching arithmetic, but I think that introducing more advanced concepts early could be a good use of time. It looks like New Math was basically that?
My kids learned it this way, and it was somewhat useful to show that we could arrive at the same solution using different methods.
It was a curriculum reform in the united states in the 60s that emphasized introducing abstract math concepts very early.
I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math
I dont think i have ever used cursive outside of the class teaching me cursive.
I think the problem is that modern ball point pens dont glide well, making it not a useful way to write.
Aside from very occasional drops into printing, I exclusively write in cursive. Once you get proficient you can write very fast with cursive -- regardless of the pen/pencil. Can other people read my writing? Yes, if I slow down. But if it's notes for me, then I can go easily double the speed I have with printing and it feels as "seamless" as touch typing.
It's mostly an issue with English cursive. A lot of styles are just not great.
In Eastern Slavic countries, you are expected to learn to write in cursive and use it in typical writing. Writing in block letters (outside of official forms) is considered to be a sign of illiteracy.
And it really is faster, once you get some practice.
I write cursive all the time and I've never had a problem with any pen, new or old.
Some people like handwriting notes. I know some that do that on tablets rather than paper though.
I have terrible handwriting so type whenever possible.
The only thing my kids have needed handwriting for (i.e. they did not have the option of typing) has been exams.
You do not have to use cursive for handwriting notes. What happens with young people (based on what teachers in my kids school said) is that they abandon cursive for handwriting the moment they can - and everyone basically invents own way of writing letters.
End result is worst then if they were taught handwriting that is not cursive, looks more like printed text and is easier to read and write.
I feel like most of my peers took handwritten notes, but most of them didn't write them in cursive (some did)
It did not even occur to me that people would take handwritten notes not in cursive.
I re-taught myself joined-up writing in my early-mid 20s, mainly because it looks nice. Get yourself a pack of Uni Jetstreams - they are not too expensive and glide about as well as any pen I've ever used.
I didn't actually know we'd switched to computers. I knew there was a party, 'Liberalerna' that was for it, arguing for a kind of naïve general digitalisation etc. but I always assumed it was too crazy to be implemented, so I'm very happy with this.
My first grader has a pretty nice Dell 2-in-1 from school (with 8GB of RAM!!!). She had a school-provided iPad in kindergarten. I don’t think either of these things did her any good educationally (except making sure every kid has a device to do remote learning, which thankfully they haven’t had to do yet).
I really think schools should follow the model I had when growing up in the 80s and 90s: use non-internet connected devices once or twice per week in a computer lab until high school.
Good.
Tactile thinking remains quite useful and having the basic motor skills translates into manufacturing, the arts, and more of life than many may realize.
Early in my life, I began to "calibrate" my perception. I call it the "eyecrometer"
Today, I can call out sizes, distances, speeds, feeds and more to fairly high accuracy a majority of the time. It has paid off in manufacturing and prototyping more times than I can count.
This all starts with the basics:
Read it, hear it, see it, feel it, do it, say it.
A younger coworker has began a similar journey. And they just started a robotics group on it too.
Be digital. It helps. It has power, but don't trade your potential for the love of trees.
Augment said potential instead.
There isn't a single source in that article.
Right. This was announced back in 2023.[1] Somehow it showed up in India Defense Review recently.
It's for preschoolers. The announced goal was to "completely end digital learning for children under age 6".
[1] https://apnews.com/article/sweden-digital-education-backlash...
OK, we've changed the URL to that above. Thanks!
Submitted URL was https://indiandefencereview.com/in-2009-sweden-chose-to-repl.... The same story (and even the same article text) shows up on a bunch of other sites too: https://www.google.com/search?q=Sweden%20is%20investing%20%E.... Usually it's pretty easy to sift out the blogspam and find the original but I was at a loss in this case.
Ok, but huge textbooks with lots of ink colors and lots of diagrams that make them heavy, hard to carry, hard to read and use, and expensive?
Or textbooks like they used to be back in the 60s?
Makes me wonder. Can't they make book pages out of thin, thin plastic now ? Lighter to carry ? Maybe annotatable (and erasable too) ?
Yes, it's called "stone paper" or sometimes "rich mineral paper". It's a resin (typically high-density polyethylene) that's filled with, typically, calcite, with very high filler loadings up to 80%, then coated to provide the writing surface: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370899755_Biodegrad... https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1176...
This is causing problems in Australia (where the product is widely used) because confused people put the "stone paper" in the paper recycling, falsely believing it to be paper.
If you wanted to minimize the thickness, you'd probably want to change the formula in several ways:
- use a higher-strength plastic like polyimide;
- include some kind of high-strength fibrous, acicular, or platy reinforcing filler;
- use a more powerful opacifier than calcite, such as rutile, enabling you to use a lower filler loading and thinner layers.
Talc, mullite, fiberglass, and bentonite come to mind as candidate reinforcing fillers, and rutile microcrystals can also be grown in an acicular morphology.
If you really wanted to minimize the thickness and weight, maybe there's some way you could use metal instead of plastic.
I'm 95% sure my college would have just handed me a degree after the first quarter if they'd let me type my essays instead of writing them by hand.
As a college student who writes digital essays but was not handed a degree my first semester, I’m curious what you mean?
I can't speak for everyone else, but in the same vein I've dusted off my old iPod as well... no distractions, popups or subscriptions - divine.
I replaced the battery in my second hand first generation iPod maybe three times over ten years.
Then for a number of years I used a late generation Zune that I got new at Walmart for a steal.
Now I use Spotify on a smart phone, and it's a slow web app full of ads, delayed page reloads, unnecessary videos, and a buggy seek widget. The only controls are a touch screen.
It is convenient to have my music player in the same device as... wait, all I wanted was a music player.
I think that in any field (especially in education) a balanced approach needs to be applied to every aspect. And I think this move is a way to strike a balance
(2023)
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37479472
This comment was responding to the original link
You think the Associated Press and its website is AI? The Associated Press that has been in existence for decades? The article does have sources in it, AND links to the website you link to!
Your writing style is also very LLMy... I think you're AI, and not hiding it well.
I was replying to the original link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716448
And I am not a native English speaker hence my language is AI-ish from my translation tools
The popularization of handwriting is, so far, one of our finest achievements. We take it for granted.
To me, handwriting is a skill on par with playing a musical instrument. Very fine motor movement, mind and body, years of practice. It's a miracle we made everyone do it. So much depends on humanity keeping this flame alive.
Hopefully this is only a temporary setback for the backs of the little fellas lugging dead trees around
e-ink tablets with a digital pen would be a good compromise. Kids don't need to carry heavy books, but they should still learn to write using a pen. Clicking and typing simply doesn't give enough tactile feedback for learning.
Not that this would be better but I'm surprised no ebook maker has had success in the educational market. Eink seems like it'd be great for education as it'd really only support text based distractions/bullying which while bad is less bad than the trifecta of video, images and text distractions/bullying. Its also lighter and the battery is longer lasting than a laptop.
My daughter has a chromebook for school. As a device, it's actually pretty nice and the administration aspects of it are fantastic. It can be wiped and re-imaged easily, her "files" are all stored on the network, and it's snappy. Except for PDF viewing.
When it comes to PDFs, it sometimes really struggles. I think that the device can handle them, but I'm pretty sure that the PDFs themselves are often a collection of scanned images and not text. Once she has more than a few tabs open, it takes longer and longer to switch between them and she ends up using a desktop to complete her work.
In this case, the school provides the tools for her to do her assignments but we have the means to provide better ones at home and not every child will have this advantage.
Personally, I can read data sheets all day on a monitor but I absolutely can not do the same with fiction. I either need a paper book or a Kindle, and I don't know why that is. Perhaps it's because I am looking ahead and not down?
Even on slow devices the only problem I have had with PDFs has been when they are rendered using the JS renderer.
The developer of pdf.js replied to my comments on performance somewhere once, and I think it might have been HN, but was quite happy to acknowledge (IIRC) that its not a high performance solution.
I'll have to look at it the next time she complains. It may very well be pdf.js.
Being able to flip through a physical book is so much better UX.
I've noticed this with my Kobo ereader (which I love). If I want to go back a few pages, and then return to where I am now, it's a whole ordeal. The UX is there, but I have to learn it and remember it, and it's different for every device (not that I use many different devices). All physical books, miraculously, have the same UX.
The parent post to yours makes me think that a large e-ink display would be useful in a school setting. Rather than carry around a backpack of enormous overpriced textbooks that we might use 30% of in a semester, just have one large ereader that you can use from 1st grade through your PhD.
It's like a book, but lighter! And no internet, no games, no social media, no animations. No private enterprise capturing public education to sell schools a bunch of stupid shit. Just an improvement on a stack of textbooks, which schools or parents have always paid for. Might be nice.
Personally, I would hate this. As a student I far preferred PDFs, etc. because I could quickly make Anki cards out of them, strip mine them for insights and good practice problems and then just burn them into my long term memory over the next few months. We should be teaching children about spaced repetition systems and helping them instill the one habit actually proven to help them remember what they learn, not banishing them back to the Carboniferous Era!
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, and I stand by what I said. :) Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material. That's a separate problem which can be solved with an approach as simple as "turn off the modem".
Nah -- the schools should teach to the average student and address the average problems. I don't begrudge the school system for not catering to me when I went through it.
No one is really average. Even people who are average overall are not average in every skill and every subject. /classroom This is an intrinsic problem with classroom teaching. There is an HN discussion about home education (or "homeschooling" as people misleadingly call it) at the moment...
Schools need to teach everyone basic skills for life in society. Whatever those are. In lower grades that is about the same for everyone, but as you move on schools need to push kids to where they will do well. I took metal shop in school, but I was always on the college track and so this was just a fun class I only took because I have one block that nothing else fit in - for all other kids in that class it was essential to their future life and they knew it.
The average student shouldn't be expected to remember more than 5% of what they learn through school because teaching them to use a computer program for half an hour is too hard? That's bleak.
_if_ teaching them to use a computer program for half an hour is too hard.
> Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material.
The books are brought back (at a cost) because the kids have proven to learn better from books, or a mix of mediums. They haven't, and won't, use only physical or only digital material. They'll use a mix.
You need to measure long term remembrance of the material, not short-term learning. A 5% increase in the speed of children learning a fact for the first time doesn't matter if the fact has disappeared from all their brains 6 months later, but to accomplish the latter at scale, there's no substitute - you need some kind of spaced repetition system. Otherwise you may as well have not taught the fact at all, and let them spend the time having fun or getting some exercise instead.
Is your idea that 6 to 15 year olds are going to suddenly discover Anki cards on their own and start using them? How high is that %?
I think you should focus more on teachers introducing Anki cards and less on not throwing screens out then, in a sense. I mean, the fact that screens supports something that isn't currently being widely used anyway isn't a very strong argument to keep them.
(And well, the argument against introducing it is that likely very small % of 6 to 15 years are able to or motivated to follow a system like that.)
And the school system already provide ample spaced repetition because there is repetition each year from previous year (at least in Norway, sure Sweden is similar).
The status quo in Norway is horrible, screens have destroyed education system (I have two kids going through it).
I am sure there are better ways to use screens and that is what the proponents always say. But the burden of proof should have been on those introducing screens not the other way around.
There is so much being lost now; ability to concentrate, ability to use a paper and pen as an extension of your brain (as I often do when solving a tough problem).
I don’t think education is purely about remembering facts.
For one, often we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
Secondly, we want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
Optimizing repetition for things we do want to be remembered is certainly a useful technique, but it isn’t the only or perhaps even primary goal of education.
>[O]ften we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
I've never found remembering the simplified explanation to be a hindrance to learning the more complicated explanation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have found times where forgetting the simple explanation before ever getting to the more complicated one meant it felt like I was learning the complicated one from scratch.
>[W]e want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
You can't learn any of that stuff without having the facts at hand first, however.
More importantly, "recall" is a much broader subject than it may sound at first: The ability to tackle novel mathematical theorems is based largely upon one's recall of prior proofs, which I have found to be just as valuable a target for spaced repetition approaches as any. But even if it turned out that wasn't the case, simply separating one's school day into an hour or two of "recall work" followed by 5-6 hours of "dynamic work" where we work with and elaborate upon facts that everyone in the class is statistically guaranteed to remember sounds like a much better use of one's time.
I have no idea what the actual science referenced here is on this but I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
And spaced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
>I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
Likewise, I'm sure that science is weaker than it first appears.
I can point you to dozens of studies showing spaced repetition is robust and effective, across a wide variety of domains.
>[S]paced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
In fact I only found out about spaced repetition near the end of high school, so no, I wouldn't call it "part of education since forever". In fact I consider the fact it isn't a topic we scream about from the hilltops and make it a known thing for students a great civilization-wide error. It seems closer to an open secret that was a lot less well known even just a decade ago.
It's also not "slightly" easier with a PDF, it's much easier. Individual cards that would take much longer to create by hand (image occlusions in particular) take less than a minute with software. There is a reason I insist upon using ebooks these days, paper books just can't compete with that kind of efficiency.
How is your particular description of spaced repetition really even relevant to the discussion?
Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium. ”But I can scan my pdfs and make flash cards” isn’t really an argument that applies to most children I think. So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday. Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
This is about this question: with learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
>Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium.
>Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday.
No, you genuinely can't. Your example shows exactly why. First, your whole time horizon is bounded within a single week; second, reviewing the same thing every day for 4 days in a row is horribly inefficient, as anyone who actually went through that in school is apt to remember. Your example is also bound to a single week, which means the average topic will be remembered for a month at most afterwards - that's not a good long term learning outcome at all. That adds up to 16 years where you walk out with 99% of everything you did just forgotten, and that's just pointless.
For proper long term retention of anything, we need something that not only lasts longer than a week, but that can persist across grades. A SQLite database can do this. I have a lot less faith in any human-meditated lesson plans doing this.
>So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
I follow this process with my own family, but ideally one's teachers should take responsibility for teaching and making sure students continue to do their Anki reps. It's borderline negligent not to.
>Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
Counterexamples abound to this. You are speaking to one.
Many, many students happen upon the life-changing magic of the humble flashcard, even without the force multiplier of a spaced repetition system. In middle school my class was required to use them for the first month of a foreign language, where we were expected to learn about 25 new words per day. After that, they were optional.
Nearly everyone who did well in the class continued to create and use these flashcards, because they simply worked much better than any other technique. This was a pattern which persisted all the way through high school. Of those who didn't, one cannot say it was because they had no experience with it - they simply chose not to invest the extra time and energy the flashcards required. But if this technique is so efficient, and its results so robust, then we should consider that an egregious misallocation of school time itself! And don't get me started on what could be possible with software-based spaced repetition flashcards, which are easier to make and much easier to time correctly.
>[W]ith learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
My experience still suggests ebooks win hands down. The benefits are obvious. The real problem here is not the technology, but the distractibility of the students. Disconnect the device from the Internet during study hours, or hire an IT admin capable of maintaining a proper whitelist - whatever, but solve the real problem. Don't go back to the horse and buggy because people are too addicted to joyrides in the Fiat.
”If schools used different methods in education then mediums would have benefits there”
Teachers want the medium that gives the best results for the process they are using, one can assume. If that process is suboptimal that’s a different, perhaps much harder thing to change.
It’s of course quite possible that the methods used by teachers are identical, inferior or superior to those you suggest. Or that they are the best methods for the mediums that exist (causing a kind of chicken and egg problem)
But I think the only relevant discussion here and now is how these teachers given their education and their mandated study plans (and methods) optimize their education, and what science has to say about that.
To draw a parallel to reading for other purposes, I’d never manage to get through even a short novel on an e-ink reader much less a screen.
I print any scientific articles I have to read on paper otherwise they are much much harder to understand.
Anecdotal and N=1 but I don’t think I’m alone in my Fiat.
What would stop a kid from doing the same with physical books rather than PDFs?
You can't screenshot a physical book nearly as easily as a PDF. That's an issue for making flashcards out of a whole host of useful informational visuals, not to mention stuff that is just plain hard to communicate in plain text.
Downvotes should not be for disagreeing with content!!
I suppose it depends on how you think of free speech:
1. Free speech means I should be able to say anything (or in this case vote in any manner) that's legal, and that's the only consideration.
2. Free speech is a foundation for a higher level goal of a society that also values etiquette, respect, and discretion.
That is quite literally what they are for!
Downvotes is for removing thoughtless comments and spam.
I try to upvote someone making a well thought out argument that brings clarity to the discussion even if I disagree with it.
And I try to downvote something I agree with if it was stated in an incoherent manner.
I don't begrudge them for downvoting. They are, nonetheless, wrong in their belief that a return to printed books makes long term sense.
Do you have any reasons for this beyond ease of reproducing portions of the text to drill yourself to remember it verbatim?
Yes. Over 12 years of use I have consistently found spaced repetition to be the most enjoyable way to learn basically anything, and essentially the only way to ensure things I don't regularly use as part of my job continue to be things I can remember. Some subjects I have in rotation at the moment: Finnish, Haskell, SQLite database internally, cash management and financial jargon, old photos and video clips of my childhood cat who I loved dearly.
But, more to the point: You seem confused as to the true generality of the technique. Flashcards can be used in much more interesting ways than just checking to see if you can recite all the lines of Homer correctly or something.
The vast majority of cards I have are questions of understanding - e.g. a card like "How many unique strands of DNA can be made from 100 A-T pairs and 100 C-G pairs?" You can't memorize all those digits. You need to remember how to solve the problem, which is quite simple, but not so simple it's worthless for a non-mathematician to solve without pen and paper.
Well yes perhaps I am confused, because if the cards strength lies in their ability to capture understanding beyond what is written in the text directly then the ability to create them via copying and pasting means that your claim that digital resources are superior to paper based ones because of this is lacking
The benefits are obvious to anyone who has used such a program. Consider for example a technique like the cloze deletion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test
The question side of the card may be directly copied from the textbook, and read something like "An increase in the supply of a complementary good Y typically causes the price of good X to [...]." You can then correctly answer "decrease" or "lower" or "go down". You don't need exact phrasing, because you are grading the card yourself; and actually forming the cloze deletion is in most SRS programs a single keyboard shortcut away. This 10 second loop of copy, cloze delete, create gets you a huge amount of the benefit of learning and remembering the reasoning embedded within the sentence. Imagine trying to create a cloze deletion by hand - you'll be there for 2 minutes just copying the sentence.
The next level up is an image occlusion, where you actually screenshot an entire diagram, math equation, section of code, etc. and then selectively hide parts of it, asking yourself to fill in the blank. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155
Image occlusions are close to trivial in a program like Anki once you've made a few. But they are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to make flashcards of unless you feel like drawing e.g. an anatomically correct human brain the same way 17 times in a row.
Right choice is to use e-ink tablets, not to switch back to text books.
Really sad the e-ink hasn't seen more widespread use. It's like no one wants a middle ground between tech-hype and tech-doom.
Choice is an excellent option.
Printed books and or electronic versions, seems like the best way to go for education.
Nah, try again. Producing that device, in Asia, is worse for the environment than whatever a tree here and there could.
Are e-ink displays especially bad for the environment, or are you talking about electronics in general?
That depends on the number of books obviously
The books might be printed in Asia as well.
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love this
Physical reading/writing >> Digital reading/writing