The complaint seems to be that entertaining books are not sufficiently educational. What I think we should really be complaining about is that educational book

The complaint seems to be that entertaining books are not sufficiently educational. What I think we should really be complaining about is that educational books are not sufficiently entertaining. Many of the startup websites promoted on Hacker News go to extreme lengths to reduce "cognitive load" - to make everything as easy as possible for their users to understand what they are doing. Entertainment is content presented to us in a manner which does not require unpleasant effort on our part to maintain our attention as readers, listeners or viewers. When text-book writers put the same effort into making their content entertaining as startup websites put into the UX of their websites, then we will have an educational revolution. Actually, for most people, video is more entertaining than books, so the best results will come from making entertaining videos on technical subjects. It is much easier to be entertaining if your content is "fluffy", and some of the most entertaining content is about "almost nothing at all", like Seinfeld, for example. But that is no excuse for neglecting the need to make serious content as entertaining as possible. To get some ideas about how to make technical content more entertaining, try the following: * Search for your favourite technical subject on YouTube, and watch the most popular videos. * Still on YouTube, search for "vlog", or "youtubers", or anything else that leads to videos made specifically for YouTube which include visual and verbal presentation of non-fictional content and commentary. (For example, see Ray William Johnson.) * Observe the difference. * Don't just observe the difference. Revisit the technical videos, and identify each point of pain, where the video requires effort of the viewer in a manner that would never have occurred in the "entertaining" videos. It could be things as simple as an extended interval where nothing happens at all, or too much talking and nothing happening on the screen, or the talking consists entirely of reading words that are already on the screen, or action on the screen but no talking, or too much talking about what the presenter is going to talk about. Etc.