Books are a Worthless Technology

Books are a worthless technology.  Now, I might be biased.  I haven’t read a book in years, and I run an Internet company.  However, I think my observations on this matter are accurate.

What is a book?  A book is a physical medium through which information from a single information source is transmitted to multiple information sinks.  Therefore it can be considered a form of broadcast communication much like television.  The paper, binding and physical makeup of a book tends to be very expensive for the amount of information that a single book contains.

How much information is in a book?  Well, if we estimate 300 pages per book, and we estimate about 2500 characters per page.  And we say that each character can be represented by 1 Byte.  Then, we would get 750KB for the information content of a book.

Now, let’s say that you want to learn as much as you can about a certain topic.  I spend $20.00 on an Internet connection for a month, and you spend $20.00 on a book.  How much more can I learn than you?  Well if my Internet connection has a 1MB/s download seed, I could download more information then your single purchase in less than 1 second.  Oh and by the way, I have a whole month of doing this, so you can see that I can grab much more information than you.

Well, I can grab so much information in fact, that it is actually more than I can actually digest in a month’s period of time.  This is where most of the pro-book crowd claim that they’re antiquated linear method of consuming information is better.  It’s not. And here’s why.

You have information from one source.  A single information source is biased.  If I need clarification on any of the information in my single book, I can’t get it.  I also have to commit to reading the whole book from front to back.  This could be a monumental and costly waste of time.

When retrieving information from the vast pool of resources on the Internet, you have to be smart about qualifying sources.  Understanding how different sources are biased.  You start to learn how your topic is related to other topics.  You can start to understand how more and more things fit together.  The thought of committing even a full hour of time to any one resource is a fundamentally flawed approach when you are literally drowning in information.  

Many in the pro-book crowd consider this inability to commit and focus on one resource at a time a flaw, but it is actually at time tested best practice.  Does a CEO of a company read an entire 32 page report or does she just read the “Executive Summary”.  Think about it.  We are information rich.  There is simply too much information and not enough time to consume it all linearly in the form of bulky and inconvenient books.

I won’t go into detail here, but the Internet allows for every possible information communication paradigm (asynchronous, synchronous, pier-to-pier...).  Where as a book can only provide asynchronous broadcast communication.

So next time someone tells you that your generation is stupid for not reading books, don’t be upset about it, because guess what?  We are not as good at reading books.  Just like we are not as good at using a typewriter.  Things change, technologies change.  We are significantly better at consuming, generating, and disseminating information than any generation of people before us. So while technologies change, the “nostalgia bias” apparently remains a common fallacy of logic for most people.