[dawatchusay]

If you think of reading as one means of consumption of information then the ability to read may just be outdated, and people are moving to new forms of information consumption. Reading was never particularly exciting for me even though I wanted to discover what was hidden (often buried) in texts and if you can get the information in a more engaging and streamlined way so be it. Maybe the issue is really the content people are streaming and the lack of critical thinking and not that they are streaming at all.

[potsandpans]

> If you think of reading as one means of consumption of information then the ability to read may just be outdated, and people are moving to new forms of information consumption.

Im not sure that this is an accurate observation -- at least wholly accurate.

The implication being, "other forms of consuming information are equal to the desired end goal." Or perhaps more strongly, "other forms of consuming information are better at achieving the desired end goal."

For which, you'd have to define an end goal. If it's pure entertainment, I think I'd agree with the above.

But there are other important reasons to consume information, and I'm unconvinced that there is anything better than reading. Things such as synthesizing complex ideas and retention of information come to mind.

I realize this is unsubstantiated, there may be research into it. To me if feels self evident, but i can only offer anecdotal evidence to support it.

[ahi]

The written word offers a precision not found in many other media.

[Charon77]

Yet there be clickbait headlines. Novels are written for people to imagine the scenes described by the author, requiring your own 'filling in' to be immersed in the story.

[aithrowawaycomm]

There are many topics that really can only be discussed with at book-length and with text, since the reader needs to think critically and be able to quickly reference other parts of the text in order to understand.

"Get the information" is too passive, learning is not just about amassing a collection of facts. People amassing a collection of facts without having (or even wanting) holistic understanding is one of the dangers of a post-literate society, "apprehend[ing] the world through fragmented pictures."

[drewcoo]

> be able to quickly reference other parts of the text in order to understand

That implies a nonlinearity that non-books may handle better. Books (tomes) are better at that than scrolls because of flippy pages and indices, but hypertext was built for deep references, as just one example of better than books.

[adrian_b]

That is the theory, but not the practice.

In practice, I always prefer a PDF manual with thousands of pages to the same information provided in HTML format.

At big book sizes, it is much easier to navigate through a PDF, even when it does not have chapter bookmarks and you navigate only by searching, than through any HTML that I have ever seen. The HTML may have extra links, but those only infrequently match the pattern in which I want to navigate the document.

The fixed, immutable formatting of the PDF is of great help when navigating randomly through a document, in contrast with the unpredictable formatting of HTML, where you may find the same elements in different positions when you revisit some part of the text.

One of the reasons why links are much less useful than searching for navigating through a document is that very frequently I want to go through all sections of the document that mention something, not to a single place. This feature has already been provided for centuries by all well made printed books, using indices, but on computers much more complex searches are possible than with the traditional word indices.

[voltaireodactyl]

Footnotes and references are the equivalent and imo often lead to more robust sources.