[another_twist]

Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap.

For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.

[rramadass]

A previous comment of mine is relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41567665

[ontouchstart]

I got a kindle Scribe which can load PDF, HTML and text files via iPhone Kindle App and read offline.

Since most pre-1925 books are out of copyright and free on https://gutenberg.org, ACM is open access (https://dl.acm.org/) and we have open https://arxiv.org/, it is the golden age for readers seeking original content.

We don’t need bots to read for us. We can live in the mind of human writers.

[muwtyhg]

Are technical/scientific books from pre-1925 particularly useful for self-learning today? I'd imagine for most disciplines, the knowledge has progressed and possibly changed course since then and it may be more outdated than not.

[AnimalMuppet]

It might depend on the topic. Classical mechanics? I'm not sure that there is any fundamentally new knowledge since 1925 in that field. What's different is that people have 100 more years of figuring out how to explain it well.