Three wonderful limitations of books
In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin.
The infinite Internet has many positive elements. It makes a lot of obscure information accessible in ways that books couldn’t without prohibitive efforts. It makes a lot of human connection possible, especially in today’s disembedded world-travelling age.
However, the limitations of books make them a more attractive medium than the Internet. In this article, I will discuss three of these wonderful limitation: their finitude (each one has a limited number of pages); the stability of hardcopy media; and the effort required to read. In discussing each of those three limitations, I will draw an (unfavourable) comparison to the Internet and to AI.
The finitude of books
‘If you ask a certain book an off-topic query, it responds politely “ask another, I don’t know that.” A book would never attempt to flood a finite mind with infinite knowledge.’
Anti-Humanism, by Ryan Hunneshagen
Books are limited. Even a 1000 page book on a niche topic does not promise to provide comprehensive knowledge of its subject. While this may seem like a difference of degree with the Internet (the Internet is much bigger than a book), I believe it is closer to a difference of kind – the Internet is infinitely bigger than a book, in such a way that it fundamentally changes the medium. It is possible to read a whole book, perhaps even to read all the books in the library in your life. It is not possible to read some websites (e.g. Wikipedia), let alone all the pages on the Internet. After all, a book does not grow – but the Internet grows at such a rapid rate that we cannot keep pace.
This leads to a difference between the way we relate to Internet and books – that we make choices when we read. If you don’t have a book on the right topic in your hands, you won’t be able to read it! So you have to choose on which topics and from which authors you would like to read.
I have a pile of books in my room that I would like to read. Most likely, I will not read all of them. New books will be added – a gift from my mother, a recommendation from a friend, a book that was mentioned in one I recently read – at a faster clip than I read. However, every one of those books has been chosen because I, or somebody I trust, believes it is worthy of being read.
We don’t choose what we read on the Internet. Somebody else chooses it for us – the makers of the websites, who profit from our time being spent on their medium. The algorithm doesn’t say “I think Tijmen would enjoy this article.” It says “I think Tijmen would spend time on this article.” In fact, often the articles on which the algorithm knows I will spend more time are those which outrage me, or disgust me, rather than edify me.
The developments in AI are likely to accelerate this trend. Not only does the Internet have an (essentially) infinite amount of content for us, AI will be able to generate an actually infinite amount of content. Right now, it is a sidebar that sits by already-extant content. Soon enough, it will likely be generating all of the content we see, tailor-made just for us.
I would much rather have a finite medium that says “Choose carefully, because I don’t know all the answers” than an infinite medium that says “Open me up, I already know what you want.”
The stability of books
By saying that books are stable, I mean that they do not change after they are printed. The information that the author was documenting is the same as the information that we consume.
The stability of books allows us to engage with the author essentially first-hand. We thus come to understand more the way they saw the world. Listening directly to somebody else’s perspective can help us to develop our own views as well. An example of this is William Barrett’s 1958 book Irrational Man. I would highly recommend this book for its explanation of the paradigm shifts brought about by the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the Marshall Plan. Reading it helped me to understand the author and his time, and in so doing, helped me to understand the current world, which was shaped by theirs. I would have had no way of engaging directly with people at that time, other than talking to my grandparents, who are filtering their thoughts through 80 more years of lived experience. But through books, I am able to engage with a person living in the 1950s, living in the 1850s, or living in the 50s BC.
When we look to the Internet for opinions, on the other hand, we are only engaging with people alive right now, which can drive rapid swings in opinion as well as prevent our learning from the past. After all, given that a very high percentage of all written words throughout human history have been written on the Internet, it is all too easy to ignore the 5,000 years of written history that comes before us.
This trend is likely to accelerate greatly with the “AI revolution.” It used to be that typing a request onto a search engine would generate a list of discrete pages, all of which were one author’s opinion as to a topic. Now, above this, we get an AI-generated section that summarises what the pages say. “The answer is …, according to three sources.” This is a very convenient feature!
But the fact that AI generates the content for us is also worrying. Will the AI give a fair summary, or will it tell us what we want to hear? The answer changes every time we search, dependent on what the AI thinks we will engage with. The AI will not be speaking the full truth. It will be synthesising a narrative tailor-made for us.
The effort required to read
While the effort required to read may seem like a bad thing, it is in fact beneficial. We all know that putting in effort increases how much we remember. If we vaguely flip through a few articles, we won’t remember anything. If we underline things, think about the arguments made, respond to the text, we will remember more. This is not only the case with individual instances of learning, but also with broader media through which we learn. The way that we use media (as an extension of our intellectual faculties) in fact changes our intellectual faculties’ relationship to the knowledge that a specific medium stores. For example, the writing down of poetry in books reduces our ability to recite poetry from memory.
The Internet, though, contains essentially everything. We don’t need to remember facts anymore – we have Google. We don’t need to know how to do things anymore – we have YouTube tutorials available in our pockets. And once Elon Musk gets his microchip working, our brains will be able to turn into mush as the chip does everything on our behalf.
Books can give you instructions if you need them. If you want to know where a city is, you will need to turn to your atlas, search it up in the index, then go to the map, and locate it in the grid reference. If you have just the right how-to book at home, you still need to find it, flip through the index, and interpret the pictures. But at the end of completing the task, you will remember it much more clearly for the simple act of having done it. How much better are the people at navigating who learnt to do so using books, rather than Google Maps?
In fact, the Internet discourages even turning to books by placing a very convenient alternative between us and the book. We can find a synopsis for anything online. If your high school English class assigned you a book in the 1960s, you read it. If your high school English class assigns you a book now, you Google “chapter 3 synopsis” the day before the test.
Once again, AI accelerates this trend. Every answer (or, at least, every answer it thinks we will read) is at the tip of our hands. My dad (an early adopter, apparently) already goes to ChatGPT instead of reading things himself. Other friends of mine no longer read articles, but instead feed them to an AI chatbot and ask for a summary.
In my part on the finitude of books, I boldly claimed that every book in my room was worth reading. That might not be true. Rarely, I would pick up a book briefly, only to decide, “This is a waste of time, I’d best not read this.” (Though this happens far less frequently than it does on the Internet!) If I am reading a book that I find it a waste of time, I will put it aside. This is because books cost effort. I have to hold the book in the light, keep my eyes focussed on following the lines, convert the text I see to words and to thoughts, remember what chapter I’m in, what the author said last chapter, and many more cognitive tasks! Therefore, a book has never sucked me in so deeply that I can’t stop reading.
Of course, I have occasionally been absorbed in a book and didn’t want to stop reading. Hopefully you have too! But there is a real difference between wanting to keep reading a book, and not wanting to put in the effort to turn off the Internet and do something offline.
That is why being absorbed in a book is a good thing – it is a virtue of yours to be able to delight in the author’s quality writing. It is not (like an Internet addiction) a vice of yours that makes you unable to delight in something else.
All of this is in stark contrast to the Internet, which is far too easy to open! When is the last time that you looked something up on the Internet and read only that for which you came? Versus, when is the last time that you didn’t intend on looking at anything on the Internet at all, but still somehow ended up so far down the infinity scroll that you can’t remember where it began?
I recently found out that my parents used to share this opinion too: When I was a child, I would sneak books to bed and read them under the covers with a light. Apparently, this trick was noticed, but my parents let me get away with it so as to promote the habit of reading. Note that they wanted to “promote the habit” of reading, not “foster the addiction.” I would suspect, and very much hope, that my parents would have taken a different approach with a smartphone hid under my covers.
Conclusion
The infinite Internet is a good thing, but limited books are simply better. And this “betterness” is caused by the limitations of books, as opposed to the infinite Internet. The finitude of books means that we deliberately choose to read things that we know are good. The stability of books allows us to go “to the source,” essentially first-hand, without alteration. And the effort required to read books makes them less addictive and more educational.
So, here is my recommendation: Read more books! Stop scrolling on your feed, and pick up a book you think you will enjoy instead! (Chances are, you will enjoy it more than you did your feed, and you will have benefitted from it.) Stop using the Internet on your phone so much. Put barriers in place – delete your social media apps; turn off Location Services so that Google Maps doesn’t just give you a blue dot to follow; set ScreenTime controls.
Are there other limitations to books that you think are a good thing? Or do you have other recommendations or stories on how you started to read more?