DEBATE: Are textbooks obsolete?

Textbooks are artifacts which authors pour thousands of hours into creating and are a wealth of knowledge.  Their format is precisely what was intended by the author and publisher to convey a message efficiently.  However, advanced textbooks may be unreadable by a student without the help of a teacher.  The teacher is heavily reliant on the textbook to teach a class, and if the student can't read the text by the end of the class, something went wrong.  After all, it takes a semester just to figure out what the stuff in the book means, and you're supposed to spend more hours outside of class studying than in class, so that's a lot of time spent with a book for one particular subject. 

 

 

 

But it’s about more than just thrills and fun. Today, technology in schools is helping students to grasp complex subjects by allowing them to interact with educational content in a way that best suits them. Not only does this approach lead to increased personalisation, but it can also help with comprehension and memory by allowing students to experience learning from a first person perspective.

 

There are many reasons why people don’t read as they once did. The major reason is that there is a feast for the eyes without the need for settling down and focusing on the written word. Television provides a variety of images, video games deliver bright colors and packed action, and the Internet gives the power of immediacy.

 

 

I guarantee that a good textbook and a good teacher working together can more effectively get a student to understand calculus than can Wolfram Alpha, no disrespect to the website, but books are written with the intent that a professor will explain it to a student, or that the student will work every problem in the book. 
What I mean is that books are not obsolete, it just takes time to absorb the knowledge found in them.