I go through phases of mostly reading online vs mostly reading printed books. I strongly suspect that pieces like this, which focus on saving print culture, ar

I go through phases of mostly reading online vs mostly reading printed books. I strongly suspect that pieces like this, which focus on saving print culture, are driven more by emotion than reason. Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's worth reading. For example, many printed books are literally fiction. If you read something online, more likely than not it is at least "based on a true story". Our culture attaches a certain significance to reading printed literature. It's supposed to make you deeper and more cultured. That's very nice, but I don't think reading classic literature as a hobby is meaningfully different from, say, listening to avant-garde jazz or reading old superhero comics as a hobby. I'm skeptical reading fiction makes you a better friend, worker, or citizen. Just makes you more "cultured". (Which is fine!) What about nonfiction? A lot of nonfiction doesn't respect the reader's time. "This book should've been a blog post; this blog post should've been a tweet." Nonfiction print authors tend to devote many words to irrelevant anecdotes, stating common sense, or repeating a point they already made. And just because it's in print doesn't mean the information is accurate. I know one blogger who started doing spot-checks and concluded many printed books have inaccurate info: >I was worried my epistemic spot checking project was doomed before it began. The well regarded Sapiens dismissed a link between cultural and genetic evolution, and Last Ape Standing made two explosively wrong errors in the first chapter. Neither related to human evolution (one was about modern extreme poverty and the other about cetacean evolution), but I just couldn’t let them go. I worried that every book was terrible if you actually fact checked it, or maybe just every book on the emergence of homonids? https://acesounderglass.com/2017/04/18/epistemic-spot-check-a-brief-history-of-the-human-race-michael-cook/ https://acesounderglass.com/2017/04/18/epistemic-spot-check-... Finally -- we forget much of what we read anyways! So in conclusion, I don't think it's print culture which is good, so much as social media that's bad.