Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023)
188 comments
·January 15, 2025submeta
NoboruWataya
And let's be honest, a good book collection is a great addition to a room, aesthetically. People tend not to talk about that aspect, I think they worry about being seen as pretentious showing off their books. But I think a book collection can be a great decoration, just as flowers or a painting can be.
And if you have family or friends over and one of them sees something they like, you can lend it to them there and then (if you are so inclined). Some of my earliest reading-related memories are being in an uncle's or neighbour's house and being fascinated by a book on a shelf that they kindly let me take home to read.
djhn
And they improve room acoustics a decent amount, making the space that much more pleasant.
Obscurity4340
Are books like a natural version of those fancy futuristic sound panels in recording studios?
graemep
I will not buy DRMed ebooks. I hate the idea that someone can delete a book I bought. Once I have a book, I want to keep it.
I have quite a lot of books that belong to be grandfather, and lots that belonged to my parents. A lot of those will last another generation, maybe more. That does not happen with ebooks either.
op00to
I buy books and immediately rip the drm out. They get their money, I get my book.
galleywest200
It is trivially easy to remove DRM with a plugin for Calibre.
NoboruWataya
I think it's easier with some providers than others. I bought an Amazon ebook that I was really struggling to de-DRM (so I promptly returned it and have only bought books with Adobe DRM since).
protonbob
Not with the latest encryption. Although you can always screenshot and ocr. Or maybe I've missed something new.
bluGill
On that note, does anyone have a copy of "The C programing language" (first edition) that isn't falling apart because the acid paper is decaying? I was referring to my copy the other day and it is clear the days I own that book are numbered because of planned obsolesce in the 1970s. I never bought the second edition, but if I did I'm sure it too would be falling apart from age before my likely death.
dokyun
I got a lightly used copy off Amazon, along with "The UNIX programming environment" a year or two ago, probably. They're both fine with only a bit of wear, but I don't think they were ever of a super sturdy binding that would hold up well under heavy abuse.
tartoran
First edition may be collectible regardless of condition. And as well as newer editions it is resalable. Can you sell an used ebook you bought? How about can you buy an used ebook?
fullstop
eBooks can be backed up and survive a house fire or a flood, though.
thih9
Depends where the house fire or a flood is. If it's in a data center then they might suddenly disappear[1].
[1]: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/ovhcloud-fire...
dowager_dan99
the challenge is I don't love my books for the content, but for their essence, so ebooks just aren't as valuable. If my physically books were destroyed in a fire I would be sad because i lost the objects, not temporarily lost access to the contents.
zem
I'm kind of the opposite, I can't bring myself to let go of my collection of paper books, or even to stop buying a new one every so often, but I do not like the physical experience of reading one nearly as much as I like the experience of reading on a phone or kindle. holding a book in one hand and turning a page with a click is a really wonderful way to read.
tsujamin
The standard I arrived at is roughly "would I be sad if, in 15 years, I forgot about this book/piece of music?". If it's something that I enjoyed so much today that I'd be afraid to lose it amongst 10,000's of eBooks or songs on a streaming platform, I physically buy it.
jhbadger
Exactly. I've even gone to the trouble of getting ebooks of physical books that I have in some cases. I vastly prefer the size and weight of an e-reader as compared to most books, plus the ability to change the font size to something I can easier read as opposed to the small fonts often chosen by paper books to minimize pages.
OJFord
> I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
I've long thought the purchase of a book should be considered a licence: you pay a little more if you want a physical version too, but they're not separate things; the digital ebook comes free/is the basic way your licence can be exercised.
(Ideally licenced people would be allowed to order cheap replacements if they damaged the physical copy, but how would you stop fraudulent sale & continual replacement-ordering.)
sitkack
I understand your pain, we all seem to make dichotomies where none should exist.
Getting rid of print books is not a prerequisite for carrying your entire library with you. Why not both meme.
Hopefully ebooks will get to the point where they offer a better experience than paper books. But my mind does not handle the information in nearly the same way when using ebooks. I find them wonderfully valuable and productive, but in the same deep introspective way. They are transactional, focused and very task directed.
watwut
I ebooks better for reading already. Physical books advantage is that I can read inside them in bookstore - bookstores are much better for me when I looking for something new.
But I prefer actual reading on the phone.
bluGill
Are you reading, or are you studying? When reading my phone is great. When I want to study though I will want to take notes, compare tables on different pages and other such things that my phone doesn't work for.
jjice
I love a paper back, but man did I fall in love with ebooks in the last year and a half. I own a Kindle and a Kobo and it's just so incredible for traveling (instead of carrying two books in my backpack) and in bed (the screen backlights are just fantastic).
I absolutely buy certain books physical still, if they're of a certain quality or meaning to me. If Martin Fowler released a new book tomorrow, I'd get it physical. Hell, I might even buy a physical and digital copy.
That said, digital is now my default way to read a book.
dowager_dan99
I just love the experience of reading a paper book, especially in trade paperback - which is weird because it's not a great format, but something about the dimensions (as long as the book isn't too long), and the cover and the feel and the paper...
mistahchris
I did the exact same thing. I'm back to buying real books, but I will say I still use my ereader in situations without good lighting or where the book is just too cumbersome. Sometimes that means I get the book twice which is suboptimal, but I strongly prefer the reading experience of a physical book. My appreciation of the work is even higher when the reading experience is better.
silisili
I definitely agree that just giving kids a laptop/chromebook instead of books is not working. My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That said, one thing I appreciate is that she doesn't have to lug around 30lb backpacks like kids did when I was a child. We had lockers, but realistically they didn't provide adequate time to utilize them, so everyone just carried around all their books for the day. Most of us hunched forward because of the weight.
It seems like something like a dumb ereader would be a good middle ground? Put all the textbooks into one place, but don't give it the ability to do anything but read? That or keep the textbooks in the classroom and share.
jpcom
Physical books are still better than e-readers because you can put sticky notes on the pages, jump back and forth between pages quickly, and even start to know where pages are simply based on how many leaves/pages are split between your left and right hand. Textbooks are basically reference books, my favorite dictionaries I start to "learn by hand" to know where to flip to approximately to start my search.
sharkjacobs
On the one hand, yes, I agree. There's something about the tactility of a book, about dogeared pages, and marginalia, and having muscle memory to open a book at about the same spot where I left off.
I grew up with that and it's a very comfortable skill set.
On the other hand, I've learned ways to manage and reference information in digital formats. Bookmarks and links and pasted snippets. Attachments and full text search. Not to even get into real sicko stuff like Notion and Obsidian and DEVONthink.
Being able to easily flip back and forth between pages is a very useful technique, but so is being able to snap a screenshot of a pdf and keep it open it in another window.
I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
Suppafly
>I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
This, I'm really comfortable with technology, but I feel like a boomer when I watch kids that have grown up with it their entire lives. Some people don't need the ability to cross reference things much, but folks who do develop the skills the need without having to revert to printed material.
imadethis
I'd agree except for the ability to search in an e-book. There's nothing worse than knowing the textbook in front of you contains the answer you need but not remembering which of the 1500 pages contains it. Being able to CTRL-F saved me hours of time when I went back to school after e-books became common.
jcranmer
For a current project, I've been using a physical book as a reference manual for the API I'm working with rather than using the more typical internet search for the function name. And it's actually somewhat surprising how efficient a physical book is!
Sure, there's a lot of efficiency to Ctrl-F a text string and just find all the places in a document. I won't deny that it takes me longer to pull up the index, search for the function name in the index, then flip to the page. But then I can just leave the book open at that page on the desk (or my lap). I never have to Alt-Tab, or fiddle with the location of windows to switch between looking at documentation and looking at the code I'm working on.
This difference was more stark when I was trying to close-read a different specification to ensure that I understood it well enough to make sure a PR implemented it correctly. I needed to have three different parts of the specification open simultaneously to bounce between all of them. With physical paper, that's just a swish of a hand away. With a PDF reader, well, goto that other section, scroll down to the piece I wanted, now goto the first section again and scroll down again and wait what was that back thing again goto and scroll and scroll and goto and descent into insanity. Trying to use multiple windows ameliorates the problem somewhat, but it also takes an inordinate amount of time to set the view up correctly, and I often end up running into the "focus doesn't follow the eye gaze" problem of typing in the wrong window and ruining the view.
groby_b
A decent index solves that just fine. And usually outpaces ctrl-f chasing for a given word, because it's indexing by ideas, not words. (If it's a decent index, that is :)
iforgot22
My high school was mainly textbooks, then things were more digital in college. Normally I'm against fancy new tech, but this felt like an improvement in hindsight. I was never missing the book I needed, there's cmd+f and page skip, I can annotate without ruining it...
The real problem seems to be licensing. Lots of books are physical-only, and the digital versions are those annoying "epub" files instead of PDFs.
nfw2
Many of the beneficial affordances you mention that are available for print but not in ebooks is partly because ebook technology is kind of bad. Navigation and annotation for example could be much better in ebooks if developers put more care into those ergonomics.
Suppafly
>Physical books are still better than e-readers because you can put sticky notes on the pages, jump back and forth between pages quickly, and even start to know where pages are simply based on how many leaves/pages are split between your left and right hand.
Only because you prefer to work that way, someone that has grown up with everything digital has equivalent skills doing that stuff using tabs, digital sticky notes, bookmarks, and such.
the_clarence
I personally never used any of these things back when I was a student
throw5959
My sister that's studying medicine says that her books would be totally ruined in half a year if she used them like she uses the virtual ones.
ndr42
The same is true for my students (german school system, iPads form 7th to 13th grade): They are marking, annotating and rearranging parts of the digitized pages as they like. It would be impossible with printed books. (ok, they could take a picture with the camera and do the same) They have/use printed books but most of the students are borrowing them from the school and are not allowed to write in them.
So I use mostly digital material and most of the books stay at home for studying (the books are heavy).
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
How does she use the virtual ones?
kccqzy
My high school doesn't use entire textbooks; it uses either excerpts from a textbook or lecture notes produced by the teacher. This solves the 30lb backpack problem nicely: you realistically only bring the necessary notes or textbook required for the last few days of instruction. Anything that's earlier gets left behind at home because you won't need to refer to it often.
silisili
Interesting. This is actually a pretty nice middleground. If books were designed more like a binder of notebooks, perhaps by chapter, it would solve the weight issue while still allowing for all the things people love about paper books.
kccqzy
These days some textbooks are available as loose leaf textbooks too.
iforgot22
We did this in high school. I kept forgetting what I had to bring for all my textbook-based classes each day or what I had to bring home, so I simply carried ~50lb of stuff everywhere. That's ok cause I got swol. Some kids said this was dumb, but they forgot stuff too.
IshKebab
Heavy backpacks full of textbooks are an American style of education. There are other options between huge textbooks and laptops.
Suppafly
>I definitely agree that just giving kids a laptop/chromebook instead of books is not working.
I'm not really sure why people are pretending it's an either/or situation. Plenty of things are taught just fine or better with technology, but books still have a purpose.
>My own child and her friends just don't have the focus required, and easily get distracted out to email, group chats, everything else going on right next to the text.
That stuff is usually blocked or limited on school owned laptops. If it's not your child's school is failing at something that is very basic.
chrisco255
Carrying weight from books is good for you. Takes care of your physical fitness and mental fitness.
dalke
If the bag is too heavy (especially if unbalanced, like carrying it on one shoulder) then the kid can cause back problems.
See https://scoliosisinstitute.com/heavy-backpacks/ for more details.
ninalanyon
There is no excuse for schools being so badly organized that this is a problem. It certainly was not a problem when I was at school in the '60s and early '70s. All the books I needed fitted in a briefcase. It also was not a big problem for my children going to school in Norway between 1990 and 2015.
But children should also be taught how to carry backpacks properly, not unbalanced on one shoulder.
nfw2
To a degree. I was tiny in school, always smallest kid in my grade, and lugging 30 pounds of books around every day means I now have scoliosis.
Suppafly
>and lugging 30 pounds of books around every day means I now have scoliosis.
Doctors claim that heavy backpacks don't cause scoliosis, but can make the associated back pain worse.
BurningFrog
I would call it "schooliosis" if I were you.
duxup
Amen. My son's backpack is light as a feather.
I remember carrying my bag full, and still carrying books and notebooks in my arms. It was horrible and I'd end up digging through them to find things, not need it all ... not fun or efficient.
ToughKookie
This always seemed like a bad idea to me. I got done high school right before laptops were provided in schools all over the place. I never had one.
Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things? I figured they would be super restricted.
fn-mote
> Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things?
Where there's a will, there's a way.
I think the actual interest is in playing games. (IO games, Minecraft online, etc.)
By the time they are old enough to be into social media (14+ years?), most here in the US have their own phones to provide internet access.
georgebcrawford
Nowhere did they mention social media :-) but emails and Teams work just fine - though one of my students mentioned they can't initiate chats. I'm sure there's workarounds. I just keep my students off laptops as much as possible.
Blocking games websites is like playing whack-a-mole. Our IT dept took all of our Year 7 and 8 students out two classes at a time, installing software or doing something to block a raft of websites.
They were back playing Retrobowl etc a day later. It was pretty funny.
silisili
Depends on the school. Some are super locked down, and some don't seem to care at all.
But kids are kids. For example, mine and her friends are using a shared Google slides to drop memes and chat amongst themselves. They always find a way :).
duxup
In my experience, when the kids had iPads or Chromebooks all their traffic was routed through the school network and a web filer.
Yeah you could in theory get around it and kids did (generally to play minecraft), but social media was generally well blocked, and all traffic monitored. It is made very clear that these devices are NOT personal devices for personal activity / they're monitoring them.
cynicalsecurity
Have you ever tried using e-reader? It's slow as hell. Slow in turning the pages, slow in rendering anything that is not text. Making notes functionality is a disaster. Sure, you can search through text, but if it's PDF or images, you are screwed.
scythe
My advisor used a reMarkable 2 and loved it. I think that there is a range of quality available.
fn-mote
I'm unclear if this is a real article.
It claims to be published in 2025 but it refers to 2022-2025 in the future tense.
> [...] Sweden’s putting 104 million euros into bringing books back into classrooms from 2022 to 2025
See the comment identifying a legitimate source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42716448
Suppafly
Plus 104 million euros seems like a normal amount of money to spend updating the curriculum for an entire country. This is likely just updating the curriculum over a few years from older books to newer ones and basically unrelated to the divide between laptops and printed books.
hintymad
Speaking of school, I find it disturbing that many schools switch to pure digital, i-ready and that some similar shit. The problem with pure digital is that the kids won't learn how to communicate math, like writing down step-by-step solutions to word problems in elementary schools, rigorous geometry proofs in grade 7, and algebraic derivations and proofs after grade 7. Those kind of work was natural to my generation when we grew up - it's just what our teachers trained us to do. And now it's a uphill battle to help my kids even understand the importance of doing proper maths.
A general theme, though, is that I don't get why it's so hard for Americans to stick to the traditional but good practices, like getting rigorous training in STEM, like not solely relying on multiple choices, like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, etc and etc.
duderific
The school districts have all kinds of conflicting incentives and priorities. Someone is telling them "go digital, it's the future! Kids have to learn to use technology!" Now folks are telling them "but the kids don't learn well with laptops! Go back to books!" So are they going to abandon the sizable investment they made in getting every kid a Chromebook?
> like hiring good teachers and firing bad ones There are these things called unions...
dalke
My eldest doesn't like the computers they have in grade 2 (in Sweden). He thinks the things installed on them are too boring and easy. He would rather read books.
Thing is, the school doesn't have a staff librarian any more. As I understand it, they got rid of that position as part of the cost shifting to switch to digital.
georgebcrawford
This is so upsetting to hear. The librarians at my school are amazing. The students don't know how good they have it, but us teachers certainly do.
dalke
I weep a little inside every time I pass the unstaffed school library.
torcete
I "discovered" libraries. They are cool! They usually offer more services than just books. But you have plenty of books that you don't need to keep after having read them, and the trip to the library is like a discovery journey.
Even more, my library also has comics and comic books. These are usually quite expensive, and now I can just read them for free.
duderific
One interview question I like to give for software engineering candidates at my company is "rough out the model for an online library, where users can check out up to three books, they will be charged for overdue books" etc.
Recently I had a candidate who essentially had no idea what I was talking about. They had never checked out a book from a library.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I still was.
SpaceToast
I recently learned that my library has 3D printers for anyone to use, and microfilm of local newspapers going back to 1797; it really is incredible what you can discover in them!
shw1n
One belief I have is that a major lifehack in a digital world is making things as physical as possible.
Spend all day at a computer? Get a mechanical keyboard so every keystroke is satisfying.
Learn keyboard shortcuts so you're on the mouse less.
Find yourself frequently turning something on/off via your phone? Get a physical button and map it -- e.g. physical volume knob
Gotta mock something up or understand a codebase? Physical draw it in a notebook
Got a dense book to read? Buy the print copy and go somewhere without a phone
Obviously costs more money and space, but anything I can offload to a 'spatial' part of my brain is welcome these days
NegatioN
I think books are the best medium for learning some things, and probably in some aspects for writing.
However I'm worried some countries seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are many things that are easier to learn with computers/screens than without as well, they just need to fit the medium. [0]
Intended as a reply, but the comment got deleted, so I might as well include it here:
The article [0] is focused on homeschooling, so the exact points listed there doesn't necessarily have a leg up on traditional media (implying you're in the right environment to facilitate learning these skills well without computers, which I don't think most kids are).
One off-hand example [where screens can be better than a book], would probably be using simulations to assist in learning physics, instead of just solving the equation on a page. Things where interactivity sets the learning in better context than a book probably would.
I'm also very excited to try teaching our child math using apps like DragonBox, which seems to allow for much easier visualization of how to solve equations than I got at school. [1]
null
ddingus
Good.
Tactile thinking remains quite useful and having the basic motor skills translates into manufacturing, the arts, and more of life than many may realize.
Early in my life, I began to "calibrate" my perception. I call it the "eyecrometer"
Today, I can call out sizes, distances, speeds, feeds and more to fairly high accuracy a majority of the time. It has paid off in manufacturing and prototyping more times than I can count.
This all starts with the basics:
Read it, hear it, see it, feel it, do it, say it.
A younger coworker has began a similar journey. And they just started a robotics group on it too.
Be digital. It helps. It has power, but don't trade your potential for the love of trees.
Augment said potential instead.
dr_dshiv
To support paper-digital integration, we created https://www.smartpaperapp.com/
It’s not special paper—it’s just a computer vision system to help teacher easily convert student work on paper to digital marks. The state of Rajasthan in India uses this product to assess math and literacy for 5 million students each year.
At a personal level, I’m frustrated by son’s school that uses a digital LMS to have teachers assign jpgs of pages of the books. I find it hard to help him because I don’t know what he has done and what he will do—something that a book makes natural. At the same time, I’m a fan of cognitive tutors and other digital instructional materials. Balance is good!
skirge
I read a lot of books while being at primary and secondary school and most of my colleagues didn't, they had other things to do. Now I read on Kindle and others watch Netflix or scroll Facebook. Form of the book is not a root cause of the problem.
I went fully digital some years ago, gave away most of my printed books and bought ebooks only. Now I have my whole library in Calibre and on my Kindle. Why? Because I have my whole library with me. And I can download my highlights and process them. Into notes in Obsidian, that I can link to in my study notes.
Recently I started buying paper based books again. Man, I missed holding physical books in my hands. And I start to regret having gotten rid of my physical library. There were so many memories I had with most of these books. I remember their covers, and instantly my emotions , thoughts, feelings are triggered. I don’t have these emotions when I think of my digital books.
My spouse has books that she was gifted when she was a child. Still in our kids shelf. I cannot give her my digital books.
I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.
Printed books are a physical experience. Something that allows me to attach thoughts, emotions, feelings to it. And they can become part of my life. Like a good friend.