4 ms·
Books work well and have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years. They have few technical problems, Easy to sell, borrow, give away.
by ThinkBeat 3y ago
Books work well and have been the standard for learning
many topics for hundreds of years.
They have few technical problems,
Easy to sell, borrow, give away.
Yes, you can go about reading a book in different ways
depending on what and why you are reading and what works
for you.
I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days,
at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition
every year, or at least every couple of years.
There are just about no scientific discoveries in math that requires
undergraduate and few matters that require an entirely new edition
of graduate books.
I have also heard but never experienced that some books apparently
have an online component that is valid only for one person or one
semester or possibly one student per semester.
If true this is even worse.
I strongly prefer books to videos.
A lecture is good to prepare you or to wet your appetite.
And to clarify known difficult spots in the book.
- ekianjo 3y agoMost books are very badly written.
- brandall10 3y agoThe university textbook issue was big when I was a student in the mid-late 90s. In fact, one of my CS professors went on a rant about it, how it is simply a way to invalidate the used book market... he then told us to buy books from an online storefront with this funny name (that he assured us had nothing to do with the rainforest) that sold them for a sizable discount instead our own university bookstore.
- Tainnor 3y ago> I think it is highly unfortunate that universities these days, at least in science, then to force students to buy a new edition every year, or at least every couple of years. This seems to be a specifically American (or anglo? not sure about the UK/Australia/etc.) thing. I've never heard about this happening in Germany where there are standard textbooks in about every field that people have been using for decades - and in many cases, people just simply go with the lecture and the associated notes instead of a textbook.
- zabzonk 3y agoit happens in the uk as well as the us - university lecturers are bribed by the publishers.
- Tainnor 3y agoDo you have any evidence specifically about lecturers being bribed? Because there could be a whole other range of other explanations for why this practice continues.
- zabzonk 3y agoworking for two uk universities. and this not the only stuff these corrupt people got up to - one had the cheek to photocopy his own (crap) book using free to him university copiers, and then make his students pay for the copies. nothing was done about it, of course.
- Tainnor 3y agoThat's of course deplorable. But it just feels to me that if it happens so regularly, there must be some systemic causes and not just instances of invidual educators being bribed
- zabzonk 3y agowhat other reason can there be for very, very bad authors have new editions of books come out every year and get enforced on students by tenured clowns?
- eviks 3y ago> have been the standard for learning many topics for hundreds of years That means very little, history is littered with awful standards used for centuries, there is no magic that translates longevity into greatness > They have few technical problems Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ...
- Tainnor 3y agoWell, books continue to work for a lot of people (including myself). Every time I read a book about a topic, I come away with deeper and more contextual knowledge than if I just piece together scraps of information from badly written blog posts and overly technical documentation - and that's only for programming stuff, for history etc. books tend to be even more valuable. > Hard to bookmark (and find what those are for later), hard to search, hard to annotate (and search those later), hard to edit, hard to embed rich/dynamic content, hard to track understanding, hard to adjust content based on that, hard to tailor to a specific reader in general, hard to update layout, hard to collaborate, ... Not all of these are even true of physical books - people have been bookmarking them and scribbling in the margins for ages. And also, e-books and PDFs exist, for the people that prefer them. As for the "tailoring to a specific reader" and "tracking understanding", that's a problem for any learning resource, as people are incredibly varied. Maybe in certain situations, learning resources exist that are extremely adaptable, but I've rarely seen that. In general, for a given topic one should check out different books until one finds one that is well-suited, skip sections that are obvious, consult other sources where one remains confused, do exercises if the book has them, etc. Books being hard to edit and/or collaborate on could maybe (if it's even true) be a problem for authors, but why does it matter for readers? The one thing that I do consider true is that you can't do extremely fancy visualisations in a book. But there's no problem with supplementing a book with e.g. a website where you can find interactive visualisations, etc. (also: simply not every topic needs complex interactive visualisations).
- eviks 3y ago