Recently I started buying paper based books again. Man, I missed holding physical books in my hands. And I start to regret having gotten rid of my physical library. There were so many memories I had with most of these books. I remember their covers, and instantly my emotions , thoughts, feelings are triggered. I don’t have these emotions when I think of my digital books.
My spouse has books that she was gifted when she was a child. Still in our kids shelf. I cannot give her my digital books.
I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
Printed books are a physical experience. Something that allows me to attach thoughts, emotions, feelings to it. And they can become part of my life. Like a good friend.
And if you have family or friends over and one of them sees something they like, you can lend it to them there and then (if you are so inclined). Some of my earliest reading-related memories are being in an uncle's or neighbour's house and being fascinated by a book on a shelf that they kindly let me take home to read.
Even if I could make it look nice, it would then be an intellectual mess, it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Actually, good question, how do you people organise your books? (Full disclosure, I’m messy)
> it wouldn’t be organised properly, I would struggle to find anything.
Libraries solve this with the Dewey Decimal Classification. Most people don't have enough books for it make sense though.
For me, I don't have that many paper books and the ones I own I know by the side and the color. I keep the books that I reference often in a separate place. I noticed I don't need to find all of the books, all of the time. So organize most of your books to look pretty.
You can also group similar books together on a single shelf and then order them by color. For example I have a dozen of cookbooks and those go on a separate shelf, arranged in a rainbow. I also have a book series that goes neatly together, so I keep them it grouped too.
I also organize my clothes like that too. By general category first (t-shirts, pants, socks, jackets), and then by color.
I used to be extremely messy too (piles of clothes and documents, cardboard boxes, you know the deal). I turned it around after I read the Marie Kondo book "The life-changing Magic of Tidying up". Then after I got the mess under control I look at the pictures for inspiration how to make it aesthetically pleasing. I got a lot of ideas from Pinterest (I know, I know), but you can do an image search or check the organization subreddits too.
One thing I have notices about modern books is that they are a freaking huge. I have a large number of novels from the 1970s. Their are all 250 - 400 pages, about the the same as my wife's moderns books about people getting murdered. The 50 year old books are less than half the size. Why is there a need to make modern books into tomes?
In a way, you're letting people see the nature of things that you read - from which they might glean the nature of your thoughts, and privacy is something we all value. For that reason (and since I don't have any particular sentimental value for books, only their contents) I've long since preferred a digital library. As a minimalist, having a single Kindle on the table is aesthetics enough for me, which is complementary of the minimalist viewpoint as well.
However, I completely agree with the fact that having a physical library is a very conducive environment for kids to grow up with. I remember fun memories of my childhood reading from the home library, and thinking how pretty and colourful the shelves were too. But I think there should be a distinction between cultivating a library for your kids, versus that for the observation and assessment of strangers.
Minimalism is secretly about maximizing something, perhaps empty space and silence, or perhaps something else that you love.
Finally, life is layered on as we live it - that kid is still in there somewhere ;)
I'm not trying to prescribe necessarily, just giving a different point of view.
Woah there. Nobody* is showing off their playboy collection either. The visible bookshelf is just what you want others to see. You don’t even have to read those books. It’s like your Facebook wall - a facade of yourself.
* of course there are people proud of their playboy collection and showing it off
I like your view in this because it's just so different than anything I've thought before. Having books in common areas sparks conversation, real, substantive conversation with family, friends, and acquaintances. It's one of my favorite things to talk about at get togethers.
I am also wary of most of the cloud services in this domain.
So I wrote a little software to manage the situation -- just a simple CRUD thing that lets me manage a small personal library, or a small shared library between friends. It's not a "social network for books" or something grand like that. Just a simple self-hosted thing with minimal system requirements. There were some existing solutions, but none that really felt right.
It's published (open source) and has a few users, but I don't think I'll be able to manage it, if it receives a giant burst of attention. On github it's called 'ubiblio'. Perhaps I'll be ready to share it more generally in a few months.
Not sure if it's useful to you, but I hope it is!
Maybe simply to sell you something you don’t need, to price up your insurance, or as a layup to a precrime you have yet to commit.
If reading privacy matter a kindle isn’t it. Imho.
I mean you let them into your house, privacy kinda goes out the window when you do that. You can always put books you don't want people to know you read in your bedroom or something.
Other people are replying to you acting like this is strange, but it's actually something normal people do all the time.
Every politician being interviewed from their home for TV news, every professor recording video lectures, every remote working CEO, and every twitch streamer has considered what is on display behind them.
If I choose shelves as my background, do I want eagle-eyed viewers to see my copies of playboy, my figurines of naked anime ladies, and my copies of the communist manifesto and mein kampf? As a matter of fact I don't.
However, a statement like this "they might glean the nature of your thoughts", strikes me as .. lonely, if nothing else. I want privacy from Facebook and the general public, etc. But people that I invite into my house are people I am going to have conversations with and I want them to know the "real me", whatever that means, or at least a closer approximation of it. I certainly wouldn't want them to think that my political beliefs are something completely different from what they actually are.
Nobody cares what you think. But if there are state-sponsored actors that do, they have way more insight into your life than the _nature of things that you read_ from physical texts you own. Digital library gives off a much resonant footprint in this regard.
I have quite a lot of books that belong to be grandfather, and lots that belonged to my parents. A lot of those will last another generation, maybe more. That does not happen with ebooks either.
Also back in the day when games came on discs, they used to download the no cd crack before opening the shrink wrapped box.
[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/ovhcloud-fire...
> Customers were not even compensated for lost data, unless they had paid for backups [which were also lost], with the company saying cloud customers should be handling their own disaster recovery plans.
Curious thing to say. For me it is obvious that the content is the book’s essence.
I buy the latter. Be it a comic book, photography book, or something else. Those are artistic experiences for me.
I've long thought the purchase of a book should be considered a licence: you pay a little more if you want a physical version too, but they're not separate things; the digital ebook comes free/is the basic way your licence can be exercised.
(Ideally licenced people would be allowed to order cheap replacements if they damaged the physical copy, but how would you stop fraudulent sale & continual replacement-ordering.)
And back to the screen scenario: To the brain "excitement" is also "stressful" from a chemical PoV. So if you really really enjoyed some game (as a kid or whatnot) you probably dreamt about it too.
Even if the last thing going through my head before sleep is related to programming (which is quite often the case), I cannot remember having dreamed of computers, ever.
Getting rid of print books is not a prerequisite for carrying your entire library with you. Why not both meme.
Hopefully ebooks will get to the point where they offer a better experience than paper books. But my mind does not handle the information in nearly the same way when using ebooks. I find them wonderfully valuable and productive, but in the same deep introspective way. They are transactional, focused and very task directed.
But I prefer actual reading on the phone.
For comparing tables, I prefer laptop.
Really?? What ereader do you use? How are you taking notes (that you would be able to retrieve later in a reasonable manner), using the index, etc? I've wanted for years to switch to electronic books for nonfiction that I want to learn from, but software for reading feels so bad for this purpose.
Fbreader, nothing special.
> How are you taking notes (that you would be able to retrieve later in a reasonable manner), using the index, etc?
It has bookmarks I occasionally use.
I write actual notes either with pen&paper or keyboard into a file on laptop. Retrieval is via ctrl+f or looking at the paper.
Things like this cannot be bought digitally, nor would most readers want a digital copy. http://www.hisutton.com/pages/Book%20project.html
I cannot champion this guy enough. His website belongs jn the 90s (it needs the "www") but his skills in open source analysis and drawing are unmatched. (He draws in MS paint!)
I do remove the DRM, though. I still want to own books.
But paper is still by far the best format for textbooks. It's not even close.
Another part is I didn’t like my kids seeing me staring at a screen all the time, especially when they were young enough to not get the distinction between eink and lcd.
What’s worse is id be reading all these books and they’d have no idea, even incidentally, what I was reading. Now we’ve probably got 500-600 books on the house and kids are always pulling out something to read.
I still get ebooks sometimes to search for something specific or to feel out a book. I still use my remarkable tablet for papers and things, but my personal library (filled with my personal notes that’ll last my life) is very precious to me.
To add an additional change I noticed. Before I used to be big on reading as much as possible, remember everything. I’d get anxious if I forgot some details.
But now that’s all gone. I’ve learned to slowdown. I enjoy the books more and don’t worry too much about finishing it or remembering everything. I’m now deliberate about building my library. If I forget something I don’t sweat, if it comes back it comes back.
It could also have to do with age and COVID induced reprioritisation; either way I’m more at peace with where I’m about reading. I don’t think I’ll go back to digits books.
And oh now my children and wife know what I’m reading and who knows some shared reading habits could develop.
I am a mathematician and I used to get a ton of mileage out of Google for research. I got really good at working out likely phrases other researchers would use for concepts that I encountered, and using Boolean operators to filter out pages with similar keywords. I think those days are over sadly. I think we will see a resurgence of personal libraries.
Something is lost by moving to digital but what? By what metric?
I absolutely buy certain books physical still, if they're of a certain quality or meaning to me. If Martin Fowler released a new book tomorrow, I'd get it physical. Hell, I might even buy a physical and digital copy.
That said, digital is now my default way to read a book.
Few things are more satisfying to me being able to hand a book off of my shelf to a friend when I think that they would like it, and having them report back they read and liked the book.
I love the visual appraisal of a library a lot more in person than on a screen.
If you want to give a narrator a shot, Ray Porter is super solid. Lots of cool sci-fi books out there that he narrates.
Regretfully, I still prefer generally reading on my Kindle, so I end up buying two copies of the book.
Ebooks are also a miracle; a literal library on a microsd is mind-bogglingly amazing.
If I had to choose... I would choose both.
Funnily enough I’m contemplating buying a MiniDisc player since my music listening has gone way down since Spotify came along.
Its like the abdunance of selection is overwhelming.
Another problem is all the music apps and services that we’re supposed to use according to the music industry are streaming services: Spotify doesn’t have a CD-player feature; it wouldn’t surprise me if today’s new-computer-user had no idea that CD-ripping was even possible.
I converted all my old CDs to ogg and installed navidrome on my home server. Basically, now I have my own personal spotify.
I am aware though that this solution won't work for everybody.
Also the CDs will degrade in another decade to worthlessness, unlike books
I don't see what's "hard" with that approach. Most new releases still get presses as CDs.
Either way though I have long since ripped my CDs to my NAS system. I keep the CDs in storage so if someone says copyright I can prove fair use as I still own the media.
but kind of moot if you are settled in life are not a desperado nomad of sorts
At that time, I pretty much stopped reading. Now it's obvious why that happened, but at that point I didn't really connect the dots. I thought that I ran into a bad streak of books that just didn't hook me much, and then I was very busy, I always seemed to have something else to do rather than continue reading. So for those hypothetical reasons I went from reading several books per month to one per year, or even less.
At some point, I read a printed book and it hooked me like in the old times. And then, it dawned on me that the books being bad, or me being busy, were just excuses. The real reason is that I didn't like electronic reading. I wasn't proud of this. It wasn't a rational attitude. Electronic reading was clearly superior (less space, more flexibility and so on), and the content was exactly the same. I was actually quite ashamed of myself: was I such a shallow person that I didn't appreciate the contents of the literature enough to abstract away from purely materialistic concerns? What kind of person can't appreciate culture or art just because they don't like the medium used to transmit it? But be that as it may, the plain truth was that ebooks didn't hook me, and physical books did, so I admitted it and started buying printed books again. And once again, I'm an avid reader.
In the last few years, papers and studies have started to appear saying that with paper reading we retain more, we concentrate more, we learn more, etc... so I have started to reconcile with myself. Maybe I'm not a shallow materialistic asshole after all, and it's just human nature.
I wonder why. What you say rings true.
As silly as it sounds, my emotional connection to ebooks is somehow weaker.
This cycle has been repeating for me for a long time, I wonder if I'll find a good balance eventually. My current approach is to try and read more technical stuff digital while keeping novels, the humanities, history as paperback, we'll see.
That said, one thing I appreciate is that she doesn't have to lug around 30lb backpacks like kids did when I was a child. We had lockers, but realistically they didn't provide adequate time to utilize them, so everyone just carried around all their books for the day. Most of us hunched forward because of the weight.
It seems like something like a dumb ereader would be a good middle ground? Put all the textbooks into one place, but don't give it the ability to do anything but read? That or keep the textbooks in the classroom and share.
I grew up with that and it's a very comfortable skill set.
On the other hand, I've learned ways to manage and reference information in digital formats. Bookmarks and links and pasted snippets. Attachments and full text search. Not to even get into real sicko stuff like Notion and Obsidian and DEVONthink.
Being able to easily flip back and forth between pages is a very useful technique, but so is being able to snap a screenshot of a pdf and keep it open it in another window.
I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
This, I'm really comfortable with technology, but I feel like a boomer when I watch kids that have grown up with it their entire lives. Some people don't need the ability to cross reference things much, but folks who do develop the skills the need without having to revert to printed material.
Sure, there's a lot of efficiency to Ctrl-F a text string and just find all the places in a document. I won't deny that it takes me longer to pull up the index, search for the function name in the index, then flip to the page. But then I can just leave the book open at that page on the desk (or my lap). I never have to Alt-Tab, or fiddle with the location of windows to switch between looking at documentation and looking at the code I'm working on.
This difference was more stark when I was trying to close-read a different specification to ensure that I understood it well enough to make sure a PR implemented it correctly. I needed to have three different parts of the specification open simultaneously to bounce between all of them. With physical paper, that's just a swish of a hand away. With a PDF reader, well, goto that other section, scroll down to the piece I wanted, now goto the first section again and scroll down again and wait what was that back thing again goto and scroll and scroll and goto and descent into insanity. Trying to use multiple windows ameliorates the problem somewhat, but it also takes an inordinate amount of time to set the view up correctly, and I often end up running into the "focus doesn't follow the eye gaze" problem of typing in the wrong window and ruining the view.
I pretty much just use screenshots in snagit for that stuff.
Let me give you an example of a high-quality index entry from the Software Architecture in Practice (Bass et al. 2021) [1]:
Availability
analytic model space, 259
analyzing, 255–259
broker pattern, 240
calculations, 259
CAP theorem, 523
CIA approach, 147
cloud, 521
design checklist, 96–98
detect faults tactic, 87–91
general scenario, 85–86
introduction, 79–81
planning for failure, 82–85
prevent faults tactic, 94–95
recover-from-faults tactics, 91–94
summary, 98–99
tactics overview, 87
As you see, it lists a number of taxonomic terms that are merely related to each other and you might not think about Ctrl+F-ing for them unless you already want to search for them. You may come to this entry knowing about CAP and navigate away to analytic model space, 259.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14786083-software-archit...
Of course a good index is hard (read expensive) to write and so many books didn't have good indexes.
The index is so good I've shared my happiness about it several times.
Some are. Far, far, far, far, far too many aren't.
The half-assedry of PDF creation is a major frustration.
There are scanned-in books whose index pages don't precisely match the digital pages. Good PDFs will account for that offset themselves, but manual recalculation may be necessary.
Worse are books half-assedly converted from print to digital. These often include an index (useful for all the reasons others have mentioned elsewhere in this thread), but the "faithful" reproduction of the print text means that the page enumeration in the index bears a nonconstant relationship to the digital text. The offsets are not constant.
Then there are ePubs with the above feature. The sane thing to do would be to link the index entry to occurances. Often you'll find, again, print-edition page mentions which are of little use in locating the passage within your digital edition.
One of the underlying problems is that the print notion of "page" is increasingly archaic. For languages / typographies in which paragraphs are a useful convention, paragraph numbering might be preferable (this should be constant across formats). Direct symlinks are of course useful, but these conceal information revealed in a conventional (print) index such as passages where a topic is discussed at some length, or clusters of appearances, as well as cross-references or associated references which a well-constructed index will reveal.
There's a pre-digital publishing trend of loose-leaf or removeable bindings, with publications prepared in sections or with periodic supplements, which began in the late 19th / early 20th century. Those would typically be organised and numbered by section. The concept is somewhat trite now, but I think of it as a significant stage and evolution of publishing, somewhere between fixed-format codices, periodicals, and eventually databases and wikis.
It is quite disheartening to see a comment about importance of horse shoes being downvoted. In professional blacksmith shops, horse shoeing is a job done by a qualified farrier and not as trivial as one may think. The importance of horseshoeing for horse wellbeing is also highlighted in certain key equestrian literature.
The real problem seems to be licensing. Lots of books are physical-only, and the digital versions are those annoying "epub" files instead of PDFs.
Epubs can be reflowed to fit any screen. If done properly at least. For PDFs you basically need an A4/letter screen to read them comfortably.
PDF's work well for a sufficiently large e-book reader. Full-sized isn't essential, though I find the 13.3" display I use is quite pleasant to read --- roughly equivalent to a large iMac Retina display for reading ease (less overall real estate, but more comfortable to hold in one's hands, and of course, read under bright light / direct sunlight), and vastly superior to a typical smartphone.
Smaller displays of 8--10" should work in most cases and are far more affordable. The exceptions are typically scans from print, especially of small-font and tightly-rendered journal articles, or works with extensive graphics and diagrams. Those with young eyes can probably manage better than the olds.
ePub fits any sized display, but there are times when fixed layout truly is preferable for reading, context, understanding, and juxtaposition of text and graphics, etc. With a fixed layout and a competent layout engine or editor this can be optimised. With a flexible layout* (HTML, ePub, etc.) the dynamic element pretty much always leads to compromises or gaffes in layout and positioning.
Fixed-layout also means that spatial memory of where within a document, chapter, and/or page specific elements / contents are. Dynamic layout greatly reduces the ability of those who have strong spatial memory of written materials.
I tend to prefer LaTeX or a similar doc-prep system myself for authoring.
Only because you prefer to work that way, someone that has grown up with everything digital has equivalent skills doing that stuff using tabs, digital sticky notes, bookmarks, and such.
You can't do it quickly. Jumping between random pages isn't useful (and not faster than in an ebook), so you want to jump to a specific page, and here ebook is much faster, whether you're opening a page number or a page with some content you remember
> know where to flip to approximately to start my search.
Or you can start precisely with an ebook
And then your highlights also can't unstick because there is some dirt that ruined the stickiness of a note. And your carefully prepared unsticky bookmarks (you didn't have sticky notes around, so you've followed your advice and improvised) can't all fall out just because your book fell with its back up
But there are reasonable affordances to a practical extent within both formats.
I have a large print collection, and a much larger digital one, presently largely on an Onyx BOOX ebook reader. I'm well acquainted with the capabilities and limitations on both systems.
(I've discussed the BOOX device fairly extensively in previous HN comments for those interested.)
<https://cool.culturalheritage.org/don/dt/dt3508.html>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index>
Image: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index#/media/File:Blacks...>
Those may be cut in, or self-applied as with index tabs:
The entire notion of a tabbed interface in the computer sense derives from index tabs:
So I use mostly digital material and most of the books stay at home for studying (the books are heavy).
See https://scoliosisinstitute.com/heavy-backpacks/ for more details.
But children should also be taught how to carry backpacks properly, not unbalanced on one shoulder.
Also, only nerds and dweebs use both shoulder straps.
Rather, I don't think it's a simple matter of education, given that there are also social pressures involved.
Doctors claim that heavy backpacks don't cause scoliosis, but can make the associated back pain worse.
I'm not really sure why people are pretending it's an either/or situation. Plenty of things are taught just fine or better with technology, but books still have a purpose.
>My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That stuff is usually blocked or limited on school owned laptops. If it's not your child's school is failing at something that is very basic.
I remember carrying my bag full, and still carrying books and notebooks in my arms. It was horrible and I'd end up digging through them to find things, not need it all ... not fun or efficient.
The problem here is not with electronic textbooks per se, but the pervasive adoption of networked applications for school assignments — which in turn is used to decrease grading time so that schools can shove more students onto a single teacher.
Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things? I figured they would be super restricted.
Where there's a will, there's a way.
I think the actual interest is in playing games. (IO games, Minecraft online, etc.)
By the time they are old enough to be into social media (14+ years?), most here in the US have their own phones to provide internet access.
Blocking games websites is like playing whack-a-mole. Our IT dept took all of our Year 7 and 8 students out two classes at a time, installing software or doing something to block a raft of websites.
They were back playing Retrobowl etc a day later. It was pretty funny.
But kids are kids. For example, mine and her friends are using a shared Google slides to drop memes and chat amongst themselves. They always find a way :).
Yeah you could in theory get around it and kids did (generally to play minecraft), but social media was generally well blocked, and all traffic monitored. It is made very clear that these devices are NOT personal devices for personal activity / they're monitoring them.
The only lugging around is for homework.
There are clear studies that show reading a physical book (versus a screen) and using and physical pen or pencil on a piece of paper, versus typing or drawing on a screen, leads to higher comprehension and retention of information... and thus much better overall learning outcomes. This doesn't even consider the fact that youtube, discord, and a bunch of other apps are a swipe away on an iPad.
A common solution to the "carrying books around problem" used to be there was the copy you were issued (and mostly stayed at home) and there was a shared classroom copy.
Carrying around 2-3 books plus a binder is not a big deal (and is not a 30lb backpack... more like 10-15 lbs)... we act like this is some sort of massive hardship yet so many of us did this for over a decade of our childhood with no ill effect.
I don't think the combined weight of all books used in an entire semester would add up to 30lb, maybe if including dictionaries and atlases and other reference litteraturen that was kept in each classroom (or carted around on trollies by the teachers).
Have you ever seen the school books that Americans had to carry around? They were/are 2"/5cm thick books, weigh a few pounds each, and kids carried around about 6-8 per semester.
You made my point in that European school books are a lot less heavy and also less physically voluminous. The theory behind American books being that more spacing and less information per page makes learning easier, even though all the evidence clearly indicates that is very likely inaccurate.
Even though you are clearly one of those necessarily contrarian types for reasons that are your own, my point still stands that even if you had lockers for other reasons, the fact that school books in most European countries in which I have visited schools, utilize books that are a lot less heavy and are more information dense and can easily be carried around.
What is it with you types that you latch onto meaningless and nonsense things like that you did have lockers, while totally missing the core of the point, that the argument was about the weight and size of books??? That sounds like something you may want to think about.
Huh?
It claims to be published in 2025 but it refers to 2022-2025 in the future tense.
> [...] Sweden’s putting 104 million euros into bringing books back into classrooms from 2022 to 2025
See the comment identifying a legitimate source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716448
Spend all day at a computer? Get a mechanical keyboard so every keystroke is satisfying.
Learn keyboard shortcuts so you're on the mouse less.
Find yourself frequently turning something on/off via your phone? Get a physical button and map it -- e.g. physical volume knob
Gotta mock something up or understand a codebase? Physical draw it in a notebook
Got a dense book to read? Buy the print copy and go somewhere without a phone
Obviously costs more money and space, but anything I can offload to a 'spatial' part of my brain is welcome these days
Thing is, the school doesn't have a staff librarian any more. As I understand it, they got rid of that position as part of the cost shifting to switch to digital.
1: https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/06/nu-ska-al...
It’s not special paper—it’s just a computer vision system to help teacher easily convert student work on paper to digital marks. The state of Rajasthan in India uses this product to assess math and literacy for 5 million students each year.
At a personal level, I’m frustrated by son’s school that uses a digital LMS to have teachers assign jpgs of pages of the books. I find it hard to help him because I don’t know what he has done and what he will do—something that a book makes natural. At the same time, I’m a fan of cognitive tutors and other digital instructional materials. Balance is good!
Even more, my library also has comics and comic books. These are usually quite expensive, and now I can just read them for free.
Recently I had a candidate who essentially had no idea what I was talking about. They had never checked out a book from a library.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I still was.
Are you looking for someone who will follow orders, or looking for someone who will challenge them?
I suspect no one has brought it up, but wonder if any have decided to not bring it up for worry that a challenge would risk their chance of being hired.
I wouldn't see it as a challenge, as it has nothing to do with the task at hand. If they said "I don't want to do this exercise, because I don't believe in library fines," that might hurt their chances.
My comment was more about being surprised that they had never checked out a book from a library, since I thought that was a fairly universal experience, at least for software engineers, but going forward I don't think I'll assume that.
However I'm worried some countries seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are many things that are easier to learn with computers/screens than without as well, they just need to fit the medium. [0]
Intended as a reply, but the comment got deleted, so I might as well include it here:
The article [0] is focused on homeschooling, so the exact points listed there doesn't necessarily have a leg up on traditional media (implying you're in the right environment to facilitate learning these skills well without computers, which I don't think most kids are).
One off-hand example [where screens can be better than a book], would probably be using simulations to assist in learning physics, instead of just solving the equation on a page. Things where interactivity sets the learning in better context than a book probably would.
I'm also very excited to try teaching our child math using apps like DragonBox, which seems to allow for much easier visualization of how to solve equations than I got at school. [1]
A general theme, though, is that I don't get why it's so hard for Americans to stick to the traditional but good practices, like getting rigorous training in STEM, like not solely relying on multiple choices, like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, etc and etc.
> like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones There are these things called unions...
Everything is over budget, nobody is accountable and psychological wellbeing is way down the drain.
Pencil/Paper/Book is extremely mature and the teaching system knows how to use it extremely well. The tools just work and don't distract from learning.
My kid has a Chromebook + Google classroom and it's just a distracting mess of poor hardware and horrific software. Just bad all around the teachers even say it wastes a ton of their time.
Anyone working in tech has a skewed view because we always have excellent hardware and software because of the amount of money the industry has and the way the industry knows that spending on tools pays back in a huge way. None of that applies to schools.
It blows me away that my son got a 2024 Chromebook and the screen is about what I had on my work laptop 20 years ago. But 20 years ago all the software was designed to work on a screen that was sub-1080p, today all the Google software seems to be designed for a 27" 4k screen.
At least to me it seemed like there's a real loss of fine motor skills. Digital devices are pretty impoverished interfaces. Even if I compare my own handwriting to my parents, who learned cursive more seriously and wrote more by hand I feel like my penmanship is just worse.
You cannot learn everything. Is good penmanship worth spending time on? What are the other options. What if I gave you (8 year old you, your parents when you were 8, and you today - I want all 3 answers) a choice: you can learn cursive, piano, or go out to the playground. What is the best use of your time? My parents would have selected cursive, but on hindsight I can say it was a waste of my time. I always wished I could play piano (this is why I put piano in the list - there are millions of other options you can teach a 8 year old that we do not), but playground time is also valuable and would have appealed to me as a kid.
I'm just broadly in favor of incorporating physical development, because who knows what it does to your brain if all you do is push buttons on a screen, as I said anecdotally I don't think anything good. The easy thing to writing about me is that you can basically incorporate it for free. People learning Kanji or math on paper, for one is likely better for retention but also even cheaper practically. As far as I can tell buying students tablets just cost a bunch of money.
There are some really good arguments that penmanship (actually, any fine motor skill) ultimately improves intellectual capacity.
> How does learning violin compare?
I don't think it is, although music seems to offer its own advantages. Apparently, playing console games on a controller might also qualify.
The province of Ontario brought it back in the curriculum for example:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...
I do come down against teaching it. But then I never could read my own writing and am mad about all the trouble I got into in school for it (I have to credit the one teacher who did realize I wasn't lazy and tried to get experts to help me - but dysgraphia wouldn't exist for several more years so nothing came of his attempt). However I'm not clear if manual writing is obsolete for everyone or just me. Right note typing is a useful skill, but text to speech is making progress so maybe in a few years nobody will type and so teaching that skill was wasted.
My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used. A complete waste of time that I never used again. Anyone care to guess what will be useful or not?
Some evidence to indicate it is useful:
* https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-athletes-way/202...
I had no idea that there was a term for my awful handwriting; I think I have dysgraphia, at least based on the Wikipedia-level reading I just did after reading your post. My handwriting isn't quite as inconsistent as the example on Wikipedia, but it's pretty close.
In fourth grade, my teacher called me aside and told me that I need to improve my handwriting or it would really hurt my career prospects. She wasn't being mean, her heart was in the right place, but no matter how hard I tried I was never able to significantly improve my handwriting.
Fortunately my fourth grade teacher was wrong, and I learned how to touch-type when I was fourteen, and I type pretty fast now, to a point where, outside of signing forms, I am not sure the last time I actually wrote something with a pen and paper...2021 I think?
> My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used.
I'm not sure which version of WordPerfect you used, but at least from the mid-90's and onward, a lot of those skills would transfer relatively well to Microsoft Word wouldn't they? I remembered WordPerfect being pretty similar to Office 2003.
I mean, i think feneyman did have something to say about if it was better or not, and why.
My 2 cents, valid criticisms of new math are _vastly_ outnumbered by ones more in the form of "I wasn't taught that way and so my kids shouldn't be either" / any change is bad change type thinking. There is a lot of overlap in these criticisms with common core ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core ) which isn't particularly related.
Apparently, learning to do arithmetic in other bases helps with computer programming. Who knew.
My elementary school math pretty much completely boiled down to doing arithmetic. A useful thing to know, obviously, but I always felt too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.
It always seemed like planting the seeds of some more advanced math concepts would make math a lot more approachable.
I felt the same for a while. Until I realized my college math problems were all selected to make the arithmetic easy. Thus by doing all the arithmetic in my head I had a quick cheat on if I was right or not - wrong answers made for hard math and so I'd start over and thus fix the mistake.
The trick only worked for math though. Physics and chemistry often required harder math and so a calculator was needed to finish on time even when you did the problem right (which wasn't always a given)
I think the problem is that modern ball point pens dont glide well, making it not a useful way to write.
In Eastern Slavic countries, you are expected to learn to write in cursive and use it in typical writing. Writing in block letters (outside of official forms) is considered to be a sign of illiteracy.
And it really is faster, once you get some practice.
I have terrible handwriting so type whenever possible.
The only thing my kids have needed handwriting for (i.e. they did not have the option of typing) has been exams.
End result is worst then if they were taught handwriting that is not cursive, looks more like printed text and is easier to read and write.
I really think schools should follow the model I had when growing up in the 80s and 90s: use non-internet connected devices once or twice per week in a computer lab until high school.
Tactile thinking remains quite useful and having the basic motor skills translates into manufacturing, the arts, and more of life than many may realize.
Early in my life, I began to "calibrate" my perception. I call it the "eyecrometer"
Today, I can call out sizes, distances, speeds, feeds and more to fairly high accuracy a majority of the time. It has paid off in manufacturing and prototyping more times than I can count.
This all starts with the basics:
Read it, hear it, see it, feel it, do it, say it.
A younger coworker has began a similar journey. And they just started a robotics group on it too.
Be digital. It helps. It has power, but don't trade your potential for the love of trees.
Augment said potential instead.
It's for preschoolers. The announced goal was to "completely end digital learning for children under age 6".
[1] https://apnews.com/article/sweden-digital-education-backlash...
Submitted URL was https://indiandefencereview.com/in-2009-sweden-chose-to-repl.... The same story (and even the same article text) shows up on a bunch of other sites too: https://www.google.com/search?q=Sweden%20is%20investing%20%E.... Usually it's pretty easy to sift out the blogspam and find the original but I was at a loss in this case.
Or textbooks like they used to be back in the 60s?
This is causing problems in Australia (where the product is widely used) because confused people put the "stone paper" in the paper recycling, falsely believing it to be paper.
If you wanted to minimize the thickness, you'd probably want to change the formula in several ways:
- use a higher-strength plastic like polyimide;
- include some kind of high-strength fibrous, acicular, or platy reinforcing filler;
- use a more powerful opacifier than calcite, such as rutile, enabling you to use a lower filler loading and thinner layers.
Talc, mullite, fiberglass, and bentonite come to mind as candidate reinforcing fillers, and rutile microcrystals can also be grown in an acicular morphology.
If you really wanted to minimize the thickness and weight, maybe there's some way you could use metal instead of plastic.
Then for a number of years I used a late generation Zune that I got new at Walmart for a steal.
Now I use Spotify on a smart phone, and it's a slow web app full of ads, delayed page reloads, unnecessary videos, and a buggy seek widget. The only controls are a touch screen.
It is convenient to have my music player in the same device as... wait, all I wanted was a music player.
To me, handwriting is a skill on par with playing a musical instrument. Very fine motor movement, mind and body, years of practice. It's a miracle we made everyone do it. So much depends on humanity keeping this flame alive.
Your writing style is also very LLMy... I think you're AI, and not hiding it well.
And I am not a native English speaker hence my language is AI-ish from my translation tools
When it comes to PDFs, it sometimes really struggles. I think that the device can handle them, but I'm pretty sure that the PDFs themselves are often a collection of scanned images and not text. Once she has more than a few tabs open, it takes longer and longer to switch between them and she ends up using a desktop to complete her work.
In this case, the school provides the tools for her to do her assignments but we have the means to provide better ones at home and not every child will have this advantage.
Personally, I can read data sheets all day on a monitor but I absolutely can not do the same with fiction. I either need a paper book or a Kindle, and I don't know why that is. Perhaps it's because I am looking ahead and not down?
The developer of pdf.js replied to my comments on performance somewhere once, and I think it might have been HN, but was quite happy to acknowledge (IIRC) that its not a high performance solution.
The parent post to yours makes me think that a large e-ink display would be useful in a school setting. Rather than carry around a backpack of enormous overpriced textbooks that we might use 30% of in a semester, just have one large ereader that you can use from 1st grade through your PhD.
It's like a book, but lighter! And no internet, no games, no social media, no animations. No private enterprise capturing public education to sell schools a bunch of stupid shit. Just an improvement on a stack of textbooks, which schools or parents have always paid for. Might be nice.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, and I stand by what I said. :) Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material. That's a separate problem which can be solved with an approach as simple as "turn off the modem".
The books are brought back (at a cost) because the kids have proven to learn better from books, or a mix of mediums. They haven't, and won't, use only physical or only digital material. They'll use a mix.
I think you should focus more on teachers introducing Anki cards and less on not throwing screens out then, in a sense. I mean, the fact that screens supports something that isn't currently being widely used anyway isn't a very strong argument to keep them.
(And well, the argument against introducing it is that likely very small % of 6 to 15 years are able to or motivated to follow a system like that.)
And the school system already provide ample spaced repetition because there is repetition each year from previous year (at least in Norway, sure Sweden is similar).
The status quo in Norway is horrible, screens have destroyed education system (I have two kids going through it).
I am sure there are better ways to use screens and that is what the proponents always say. But the burden of proof should have been on those introducing screens not the other way around.
There is so much being lost now; ability to concentrate, ability to use a paper and pen as an extension of your brain (as I often do when solving a tough problem).
For one, often we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
Secondly, we want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
Optimizing repetition for things we do want to be remembered is certainly a useful technique, but it isn’t the only or perhaps even primary goal of education.
I've never found remembering the simplified explanation to be a hindrance to learning the more complicated explanation. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I have found times where forgetting the simple explanation before ever getting to the more complicated one meant it felt like I was learning the complicated one from scratch.
>[W]e want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
You can't learn any of that stuff without having the facts at hand first, however.
More importantly, "recall" is a much broader subject than it may sound at first: The ability to tackle novel mathematical theorems is based largely upon one's recall of prior proofs, which I have found to be just as valuable a target for spaced repetition approaches as any. But even if it turned out that wasn't the case, simply separating one's school day into an hour or two of "recall work" followed by 5-6 hours of "dynamic work" where we work with and elaborate upon facts that everyone in the class is statistically guaranteed to remember sounds like a much better use of one's time.
And spaced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
Likewise, I'm sure that science is weaker than it first appears.
I can point you to dozens of studies showing spaced repetition is robust and effective, across a wide variety of domains.
>[S]paced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
In fact I only found out about spaced repetition near the end of high school, so no, I wouldn't call it "part of education since forever". In fact I consider the fact it isn't a topic we scream about from the hilltops and make it a known thing for students a great civilization-wide error. It seems closer to an open secret that was a lot less well known even just a decade ago.
It's also not "slightly" easier with a PDF, it's much easier. Individual cards that would take much longer to create by hand (image occlusions in particular) take less than a minute with software. There is a reason I insist upon using ebooks these days, paper books just can't compete with that kind of efficiency.
Yes you can do spaced repetion just as easily with any medium. ”But I can scan my pdfs and make flash cards” isn’t really an argument that applies to most children I think. So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday. Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
This is about this question: with learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
>Kids in school do spaced repetition by doing one thing on Monday then reading it again on Tuesday and perhaps briefly on Wednesday and writing a summary on Thursday.
No, you genuinely can't. Your example shows exactly why. First, your whole time horizon is bounded within a single week; second, reviewing the same thing every day for 4 days in a row is horribly inefficient, as anyone who actually went through that in school is apt to remember. Your example is also bound to a single week, which means the average topic will be remembered for a month at most afterwards - that's not a good long term learning outcome at all. That adds up to 16 years where you walk out with 99% of everything you did just forgotten, and that's just pointless.
For proper long term retention of anything, we need something that not only lasts longer than a week, but that can persist across grades. A SQLite database can do this. I have a lot less faith in any human-meditated lesson plans doing this.
>So long as schools don’t have that exact process how could it? How many parents would it be that followed a process like this with their kids?
I follow this process with my own family, but ideally one's teachers should take responsibility for teaching and making sure students continue to do their Anki reps. It's borderline negligent not to.
>Student-created flash cards aren’t a thing and wouldnt be or become a thing for the foreseeable future with or without e-books.
Counterexamples abound to this. You are speaking to one.
Many, many students happen upon the life-changing magic of the humble flashcard, even without the force multiplier of a spaced repetition system. In middle school my class was required to use them for the first month of a foreign language, where we were expected to learn about 25 new words per day. After that, they were optional.
Nearly everyone who did well in the class continued to create and use these flashcards, because they simply worked much better than any other technique. This was a pattern which persisted all the way through high school. Of those who didn't, one cannot say it was because they had no experience with it - they simply chose not to invest the extra time and energy the flashcards required. But if this technique is so efficient, and its results so robust, then we should consider that an egregious misallocation of school time itself! And don't get me started on what could be possible with software-based spaced repetition flashcards, which are easier to make and much easier to time correctly.
>[W]ith learning working the way it always did, which medium wins?
My experience still suggests ebooks win hands down. The benefits are obvious. The real problem here is not the technology, but the distractibility of the students. Disconnect the device from the Internet during study hours, or hire an IT admin capable of maintaining a proper whitelist - whatever, but solve the real problem. Don't go back to the horse and buggy because people are too addicted to joyrides in the Fiat.
Teachers want the medium that gives the best results for the process they are using, one can assume. If that process is suboptimal that’s a different, perhaps much harder thing to change.
It’s of course quite possible that the methods used by teachers are identical, inferior or superior to those you suggest. Or that they are the best methods for the mediums that exist (causing a kind of chicken and egg problem)
But I think the only relevant discussion here and now is how these teachers given their education and their mandated study plans (and methods) optimize their education, and what science has to say about that.
To draw a parallel to reading for other purposes, I’d never manage to get through even a short novel on an e-ink reader much less a screen.
I print any scientific articles I have to read on paper otherwise they are much much harder to understand.
Anecdotal and N=1 but I don’t think I’m alone in my Fiat.
1. Free speech means I should be able to say anything (or in this case vote in any manner) that's legal, and that's the only consideration.
2. Free speech is a foundation for a higher level goal of a society that also values etiquette, respect, and discretion.
I try to upvote someone making a well thought out argument that brings clarity to the discussion even if I disagree with it.
And I try to downvote something I agree with if it was stated in an incoherent manner.
But, more to the point: You seem confused as to the true generality of the technique. Flashcards can be used in much more interesting ways than just checking to see if you can recite all the lines of Homer correctly or something.
The vast majority of cards I have are questions of understanding - e.g. a card like "How many unique strands of DNA can be made from 100 A-T pairs and 100 C-G pairs?" You can't memorize all those digits. You need to remember how to solve the problem, which is quite simple, but not so simple it's worthless for a non-mathematician to solve without pen and paper.
The question side of the card may be directly copied from the textbook, and read something like "An increase in the supply of a complementary good Y typically causes the price of good X to [...]." You can then correctly answer "decrease" or "lower" or "go down". You don't need exact phrasing, because you are grading the card yourself; and actually forming the cloze deletion is in most SRS programs a single keyboard shortcut away. This 10 second loop of copy, cloze delete, create gets you a huge amount of the benefit of learning and remembering the reasoning embedded within the sentence. Imagine trying to create a cloze deletion by hand - you'll be there for 2 minutes just copying the sentence.
The next level up is an image occlusion, where you actually screenshot an entire diagram, math equation, section of code, etc. and then selectively hide parts of it, asking yourself to fill in the blank. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155
Image occlusions are close to trivial in a program like Anki once you've made a few. But they are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to make flashcards of unless you feel like drawing e.g. an anatomically correct human brain the same way 17 times in a row.
Printed books and or electronic versions, seems like the best way to go for education.
