Why books don't work (2019)
Oh, books do work. Take, for example, early reading. No single book will teach a child how to read. One may reinforce letters, or a more advanced one may reinforce words, or later how they are used in sentences, then vocabulary, and so on until a point when the child has developed the skill to read unassisted. One could argue that the entire fiction genre is merely a roundabout way of reinforcing vocabulary (if one is inclined to do a cynical utilitarian take on the knowledge value they provide).<p>Extending from that, it seems a bit presumptuous to assume that a single book might then be able to convey all there is to any topic due to its size (compared to, say, listicles), given that reading itself is one of the most basic skills and one that - as we&#x27;ve seen - cannot generally be taught with a single book.<p>What books can do is expose you to some idea, in some form, so that you can soak up something from it and adopt it into your own mental framework. Pop culture &#x2F; self-help books will often try to &quot;sell&quot; a central idea by showering you with stories and anecdotes (e.g. the 1-2-3 system in parenting books), but if you have the presence of mind to already understand that the examples are merely an attempt to add weight to an argument, then you can quickly summarize the meat (the &quot;1-2-3&quot;, in this case) and think for yourself whether&#x2F;when to apply that technique, vs other techniques that you might learn elsewhere.<p>There&#x27;s a slippery slope in terms of how many core ideas one may pack in a book, vs how many supporting arguments one may add around the core idea. Add too many core ideas and you get something like a dry university textbook. Add too little, and you get books like Malcolm Gladwell. Mind you, having a lot of &quot;frills&quot; doesn&#x27;t necessarily make a book bad. For example, many consider Godel, Escher, Bach to be a great read, even though [spoiler] it can be promptly summarized as an exploration on occurrences of recursiveness (through very colorful allegory). The beauty of GEB is that the supporting stories themselves give you a glimpse of new domains to explore.<p>At the end of the day, just like a library is a collection of disparate nuggets of human knowledge and no one&#x27;s expected to uniformly learn all of it, books are but pieces of an ecosystem, with various degrees of &quot;completeness&quot; (as far as their core subjects go) and various degrees of flair; what one chooses to read or skim, and what they take away individually from each book is what the relationship between humans and books are all about.