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Why books don't work

andymatuschak.org · 4,863 words · saved by 60 readers

Designing media to reflect how people think and learn

Books are easy to take for granted. Not any specific book, I mean: the form of a book. Paper or pixels—it hardly matters. Words in lines on pages in chapters. And at least for non-fiction books, one implied assumption at the foundation: people absorb knowledge by reading sentences . This last idea so invisibly defines the medium that it’s hard not to take for granted, which is a shame because, as we’ll see, it’s quite mistaken. Picture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene ; Thinking, Fast and Slow ; Guns, Germs, and Steel ; etc. Have you ever had a book like this—one you’d read—com

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