
PDF vs. physical books - Koshkin
The page count has always been one of the important limiting factors in the publishing industry. The need to compress the material has made an adverse impact on the quality of many textbooks, leading to complaints about the lack of coherency, missing explanations, text being difficult to understand, etc. With the advent of electronic publishing, the situation has changed dramatically, and we now may be in for the pleasure of reading clearly written, extremely detailed expositions of vast and complex topics, such as statistics or modern physics... But this has not happened, and the standard curricula still rely on printed-size books and, hence, the need to be guided by a live teacher, in order for a student to be able to actually understand the material. Talk about the &quot;horseless carriage&quot;...
======
jlgaddis
... and?

~~~
Koshkin
Sure, let me elaborate.

We are already quite far into the 21-st century, and there are several
directions in which the "large format" publishing (i.e. that of monographs,
teaching materials, etc.) should be going by now instead of sticking with the
"old ways":

\- abandoning the limitations specific to the old tech; the authors tend to
show the reflexive desire to be minimalist in their exposition which results
in a coverage of the topic that is sorely incomplete and/or unclear;

\- transitioning to new ways of information delivery, the ones that are only
possible with the use of electronic devices; instead of bundling massive
amounts of the material into a single package (a book), authors could follow
the example set by Wikipedia, say, and create a much more fine-grained, yet
naturally loose, collection of "articles" each being unlimited in size and
therefore (unlike what we see in Wikipedia) detailed, thorough and thus
accessible to anyone willing to spend time studying them;

\- using completely new ways of _presenting_ information afforded by
computers, which, incidentally, would be nothing new as an idea, because the
thought of computer-based education/training has been around since at least
1960s; yet, it is still waiting for its practical application on an adequate
scale; from this perspective, teaching methods based on absorbing text -
whether in printed or even electronic form - can truly be seen as backwards as
thinking of a car as being merely a "horseless carriage".

This process is not happening in any perceptible manner, and I wonder what's
holding us back to the degree it still is.

