[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.