Paritosh Gaiwak
Paritosh Gaiwak
Oprah Winfrey once said “books were my pass to personal freedom.”
Reading is the oxygen of a thinking mind. The more we read, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the more we grow. The growth of an individual contributes to the evolution of society. Hence, one individual’s reading can go a long way in the evolution of humanity, perhaps much greater than an average mind can comprehend. However, is reading alone enough? What about the quality of the material being read? What effect does the quantity of text have?
The world is a global village, and the internet is overflowing with information about almost everything, so much so that sometimes it becomes difficult to segregate useful from useless. This makes specialized information readily available. This appears to be an advantage as it saves time. However, it has disadvantages, too: it breeds lack of assimilation of knowledge, and students tend to depend too much on instantaneous knowledge cheaply and easily available on Google.
Books are amazing, whether they are academic or non-academic. While the act of reading itself is not different whether it is a simple article or blog online or a book, the results are quite different for both these cases. Reading an article online leads to immediate acquisition of information, while reading a book leads to the assimilation of knowledge.
Consider this: You are solving a question and are unable to grasp a concept or a formula and decide to look it up online. You find a lot of blogs and articles, get a hint or a solution, and feel elated. But does that lead to learning or assimilation of knowledge? According to researchers from the University of Stavanger in Norway, not when it comes to comprehension of a subject. Reading has a strong impact on the learning of a student. The process of reading, while it might be boring for some, is a great way of assimilating knowledge, memorizing facts, and can have numerous health benefits.
Multiple concepts are often needed to understand one concept. Books do exactly that. The way they are designed, a book will expose you to different concepts and build on those concepts to later explain more complex ones. Books also allow us to revise these concepts on a regular basis.
Textbooks are generally well designed and offer in-depth review of concepts. They are usually written by practitioners of a given field, with years of experience working in their domain, and who have possibly done a lot of research in that field too. Moreover, a book is often reviewed by several competent people from the same field along with the publication house, which assures a minimum quality of content and reduces errors as far as possible. All these factors are not always present in the material available online. Additionally, there is no information to verify an online source like a blog.
Books offer a great way to expand one’s knowledge, offering in-depth analysis of concepts, practice problems and systems-level overviews of a subject. These overviews are essential for any professional or student in a field. Hence, any time spent reading a book is worthwhile, and I can vouch for the fact that in the long run, it will turn out to be an investment, not a wastage.