Ask HN: Are books worth it?

I think it really depends on whether you want to advance the breadth or depth of your knowledge.

If you want to go breadth, meaning touch a little bit of here and there, yes you can rely on the internet. There are many non-fiction books can help you in this direction, but you do not have to read them.

But if you want to go depth in a particular field, I think you have to read at least some most important books in that field. I do not believe you can learn an advanced field, say quantum physics, by just watching youtube videos or reading online articles. The reason is that many in depth knowledge are only presented in books.

For programming, I think yes you can definitely become a programmer by learning online. But then again, if you want to be an expert in a particular field of programming, you have to read books in that field. Even for data mining and AI those kind of stuff, there are good online courses, but I don't believe online materials can cover important details as in books.

The most cutting edge materials are usually presented in research papers or conference presentations.

Reading books is more than just looking at words on paper instead of a screen. At least in fiction, the process of understanding the world an author has created makes the story completely personal to you in a way that a movie never can be, because the imagined version of the settings and events is completely your own.

In this way, when a really well done book impacts you with some profound lesson about life or the human condition, it hits a million times harder because you've been living in that book's world and are emotionally invested.

The power of a good book is more than just ordinary transmission of information, it's delivering profound thoughts, emotions, and ideas packaged inside the context required to understand them.

I would say that reading non-fiction books/ebooks is a waste of time if not actively dog-earing and annotating pages.

Reading a book front to back, committing the important stuff to memory, and leaving the book unmarked, is a fantasy as far as I'm concerned.

There is nothing that replaces reading great fiction for your growth and development as a human.

I have a very similar perspective as you. Most non fiction books, being focused around a reasonably simple concept, could really be explained in a blog post (e.g. any Malcolm Gladwell book, zero to one by Thiel, Super Intelligence). By simple, I mean as opposed to complex, not necessarily easy to understand or unimportant. The main reason, I believe, for these to be books rather than posts is to examine that same concept from many vantage points to allow it to "stick". For these books, I feel like I can usually get most of the value by reading the first few chapters or many even a summary.

That being said, if you look for books on more complex topics, you find things that can't be put into a blog post (e.g. WWII, biographies, technical topics). These are things where each chapter really does bring something new. The flip side is that they're hard to read; nothing in chapter 1-n will really help you in reading chapter n+1.