Why Books are Better than Videos

picture of a set of books

By Christopher Williams

Books are generally better sources of information for learning rather than videos, especially for very specialized information because there is more available information in written form and it's more efficient to learn from.

Videos are better for more general information about computer science topics and are typically a shallow look into that topic because it is for a more general audience, especially on sites like Youtube but also course sites like Udacity. It is not impossible to find more advanced information in video, especially in courses like from MIT Open Source though it does take more time to find these rather than looking for a good book.

Text media tend to attract more advanced topics due to experts in that topic being more comfortable with writing especially academics or old school programmers. It also helps that it is cheaper to produce with it just needing a simple text editor and posted on a website rather than needing video equipment and learning how to export video files.

Efficiency for learning about a topic from a textual source comes from the fact that it is generally easier to get to the parts you need in the book rather than watching through the whole video, easier to set aside for later with a book mark and easier to understand by being able to look up words or reread the part again.

It is possible to mitigate some of these “features” in a book such as having timestamps or searching up the word that you heard or saw from the subtitles but these do not entirely solve the issue. A table of contents is far more common to see rather than timestamps in videos. The video player might have a save feature but a book or an ebook will always have a bookmark feature though admittingly this is not always an issue if the video is short which they usually are. Finally some videos have subtitles and it is not hard to search for a word’s definition but a book’s glossary is always the best way to check what is the author’s use of the word and of course you can more easily spell a word you see rather than hear in order to find in a dictionary.

Overall, written sources are better to learn from because they are more widely available for topics, especially more specialized topics and they are generally more efficient to learn from with all of the natural features they have that a video might not always have.

Image from Central Arizona College