https://andymatuschak.org/books/
Books
Books are powerful as a way of collecting and storing knowledge, but just reading a book won’t be effective for absorbing knowledge. Just reading a book is like just cracking open your textbook and expecting to remember everything. You need to use practices like spaced repetition or at least take good notes if you want to actually gain some useful information. The readers who do absorb deep insights are the ones who employ metacognition (thinking about their thinking) whether they realize it or not in order to interact with the book (is this something I already know, or should I make note of it? What do I think about this claim? Should I go research this somewhere else to understand it better?). This means that you have to read the book while also using metacognition, which is difficult (also most readers aren’t particularly skillful at metacognition).
Lectures
Lectures don’t work for similar reasons. They revolve around the theory that you will absorb material by being taught to.
Textbooks
Textbooks on the other hand revolve around the theory that you need engagement and practice in order to learn, which is true. But they often lack the emotional connection that you can feel in books and lectures. This is one of the main reasons ppl prefer books and lectures over textbooks.
What to do about it?
Authors can make incremental improvements to books by inserting a few exercises and readers can be more aware of how to use metacognition to work around the issues with the medium, but all you’re doing is building off of an existing faulty model. It would be more effective to explore creating new mediums instead.
”Rather than “how might we make books actually work reliably,” we can ask: How might we design mediums which do the job of a non-fiction book—but which actually work reliably?”