And I agree.
It also got me thinking about why that might be true.
Because on the surface, you could probably argue the opposite.
Not that long ago, if I wanted to properly learn something, picking up a book was one of the obvious choices.
Now?
I can ask ChatGPT.
I can watch a 10-minute YouTube video.
I can find a Reddit thread where someone has already asked my exact question.
And if there's a 400-page book on the subject, I can probably get a summary of it in a few seconds.
I use all of these things. A lot.
Everything Is Getting Shorter
Look at how we consume information now.
Short videos. Short posts. Threads. Summaries. Clips.
Even longer content gets compressed. A two-hour podcast becomes a bunch of 60-second clips. A long article gets summarized into five bullet points. A book becomes "10 things you need to know."
And it works.
If I need to know what a command does, I don't need to read an entire Linux book. I'll Google it or ask ChatGPT. If I'm stuck on a networking concept, sometimes a 15-minute YouTube video is all I need to understand it.
There's nothing wrong with that.
The problem is when that becomes the only way we learn.
Say I'm trying to understand a Linux command. I search for exactly what I need, copy the command, understand enough to use it, and move on.
A book doesn't always let me do that.
I might open it looking for that same command and end up reading the few pages before it. Those pages explain something I wasn't looking for. Maybe there's another command that does something similar. Maybe there's a warning about an option I was about to use. Maybe I realize the command I came looking for wasn't really the thing I needed to understand in the first place.
I've had that happen plenty of times.
Sometimes, apparently, you open a book just to check one thing and end up reading half a chapter.
That's one of the things I still like about books.
AI Makes This Even More Interesting
I use AI to learn all the time.
Especially with technical subjects.
If I'm reading about something and don't understand it, I can ask ChatGPT. If the explanation still doesn't make sense, I can ask another question. I can give it the exact part I'm confused about instead of searching through ten different websites hoping someone has explained it the way I need.
That's incredibly useful.
But it has also made it very easy to skip things.
Give ChatGPT a long article and ask for a summary.
Ask it for the important points from a book.
Ask a question, get the answer, close the tab.
I've done all of those.
The problem is that you only ask questions about things you know to ask about.
If I ask, "What does this Linux command do?" I'll get an answer to that question.
But maybe the useful thing was sitting two pages away in a book. I didn't ask about it because I didn't know it existed.
That's something I've been thinking about more lately.
There are things I've learned from books that I wasn't looking for when I opened them.
And it's hard to search for something you don't know you're missing.
If You Really Want to Know a Subject
But if I really want to know a subject, I still think books are hard to beat.
When you read a good book from beginning to end, you're not deciding every piece of information you receive. Someone who knows the subject has already thought about what you need to understand, what should come first, what needs more explanation, and what you probably don't even know to ask yet.
That's important.
Because, as I mentioned earlier, we can only ask questions about the things we know to ask about.
And if you want to become genuinely knowledgeable about something, eventually you need more than answers to the questions you already have.
You need to discover the questions you didn't know you should be asking.
That's where I think books still have an advantage.