Books do work if you know how to be a good reader (I'm taking a course right now on "How to Read a Book" based on the Mortimer Adler book). The key to learning

Books do work if you know how to be a good reader (I'm taking a course right now on "How to Read a Book" based on the Mortimer Adler book). The key to learning from a book is to interact with it kinesthetically and through metacognition. Skimming, outlining, writing notes in the margins, questioning, are all part of analytical reading. Furthermore, there's syntopical reading which tries to fit things into a larger tree and seeing how things interrelate through comparative reading. It's all really hard work, but the goal is deep comprehension (the kind that enables synthesis of new ideas). Memory is not the goal, though having a good memory helps when one is diving into a new book or journal paper. A memory aid like Anki can help one get up to speed quickly when there are lots of new vocabulary and concepts. [1] But memory alone will not lead to comprehension -- one needs to converse with the text as if one were picking the brain of someone who is our better. (if the author is not our better, best to just read the book cursorily, extract a few points and discard -- no need to do a deep reading) That said, having Anki as a memory aid can lower the activation needed to read the literature say of a new unfamiliar field. Another way to lower the activation to reading the literature is the "land and expand strategy" [2] where you read stories about thing you're trying to read rather than starting with the thing itself. [1] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html [2] https://commoncog.com/the-land-and-expand-strategy-for-reading/ https://commoncog.com/the-land-and-expand-strategy-for-readi...