Question
Why do I still turn to books to learn something in the age of the Internet?
Answer
I think Aaron and Sam may have misunderstood the question. I don't believe this is about format (physical manifestation), but form (the kind of content).
Real answer: the medium is the message.
Books (whether paper, ebook or read online on Project Gutenberg) deliver more intelligence because more intelligence goes into creating them. So long as they are written as books in the first place that is, rather than as compiled blog posts or wiki pages. The form forces their writers to think in much deeper and broader ways during the act of composition. Kinda like the blank verse form forces storytellers to tell a story tersely and beautifully (i.e. Shakespeare and lesser practitioners of that form).
This means that books are fundamentally better suited to diving deep into a subject, teaching certain (not all) subjects systematically etc. Videos may be better for DIY carpentry, Khan academy or TED talk level learning, or guitar playing, but they aren't great for learning the detailed history of the Civil War, say, or differential geometry.
Since the book form is only linked to its traditional format in a superficial way, its DNA lies elsewhere. I believe it lies in the long feedback loop. If you try to write a book as a series of chapters on a blog, the ongoing feedback, and the necessity of making each new post stand on its own severely constrains you. The too much/too soon feedback in the writing process makes you (as a writer) think more short term, be swayed by popular sentiment, and become risk averse. Having to make each post a bit stand-alone makes each post more modular and decoupled from the longer narrative. There are other aspects of course.
Of the two reasons, the feedback is more important, since historically, writers like Dickens did manage to write fantastic novels in serialized form.
So effective long-form is infrequent-feedback+low modularity. Books are like prime numbers. They cannot be factorized at all in the best cases (eg. James Joyce) and are tough to factorize in other cases.
Online-native writing, by contrast, is published as a gradual build up of factors to begin with.
On the form vs. format distinction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7...
Real answer: the medium is the message.
Books (whether paper, ebook or read online on Project Gutenberg) deliver more intelligence because more intelligence goes into creating them. So long as they are written as books in the first place that is, rather than as compiled blog posts or wiki pages. The form forces their writers to think in much deeper and broader ways during the act of composition. Kinda like the blank verse form forces storytellers to tell a story tersely and beautifully (i.e. Shakespeare and lesser practitioners of that form).
This means that books are fundamentally better suited to diving deep into a subject, teaching certain (not all) subjects systematically etc. Videos may be better for DIY carpentry, Khan academy or TED talk level learning, or guitar playing, but they aren't great for learning the detailed history of the Civil War, say, or differential geometry.
Since the book form is only linked to its traditional format in a superficial way, its DNA lies elsewhere. I believe it lies in the long feedback loop. If you try to write a book as a series of chapters on a blog, the ongoing feedback, and the necessity of making each new post stand on its own severely constrains you. The too much/too soon feedback in the writing process makes you (as a writer) think more short term, be swayed by popular sentiment, and become risk averse. Having to make each post a bit stand-alone makes each post more modular and decoupled from the longer narrative. There are other aspects of course.
Of the two reasons, the feedback is more important, since historically, writers like Dickens did manage to write fantastic novels in serialized form.
So effective long-form is infrequent-feedback+low modularity. Books are like prime numbers. They cannot be factorized at all in the best cases (eg. James Joyce) and are tough to factorize in other cases.
Online-native writing, by contrast, is published as a gradual build up of factors to begin with.
On the form vs. format distinction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7...