Comment by StefanBatory

The author of the article is a philosophy professor. In the humanities, yes it is common to read books cover-to-cover. They are more often just “books” and less the sort of textbooks you may be thinking of.

I still have many of my textbooks from College. They are great reference books, and yes, I read them all.

But that was pre-internet.

I must say, that was a very structured, well laid out way to learn. I mean that as opposed to Googling for each subtopic, reading dozens of webpages on that single subtopic, hoping to find accurate info.

I'm a mathematics graduate student. A good textbook about a topic in math is gold. Sometimes I even prefer reading a book than going to a lecture because I can skip things that I know or take more time on difficult sections. One time, in a theoretical physics course, I just didn't like the lecturer's style. Fortunately, his lectures were based on a very good book (Kuypers, classical mechanics) which I then read. But I don't think that I have ever "finished" a textbook from front to back. There are always things that are more important.

More than a few times i would re-read the textbook end to end in the week leading up to final exam. Particularly for subjects that I knew were foundational for future courses. 20 years later I still find myself breaking out my old textbooks several times a year to refresh a topic. I’m referring to mostly engineering, economics, and finance textbooks. As much as I enjoyed philosophy and ethics, I don’t find myself needing to break those books open.

In graduate school, I would spend four to six hours every night hand-copying textbook chapters into a spiral notebook as it was the only way I could slow down my reading sufficiently to actually comprehend the material.

For undergrad, I would always read the 'assigned material' (essays, literature, etc.) but only recall opening one or two textbooks.

Not cover to cover, but yes, we generally did most of the reading most of the time. I don't mean to exaggerate: sometimes you skimmed, and I gave up on Kant, but in a lot of classes you'd be lost and screwed if you didn't make a plausible pass on the reading.

This was 18 years at a massive public university, which by design drew students from all backgrounds.

I'm inherently skeptical of "kids these days" arguments, but it really seems like the smartphones and the way we approached the pandemic was incredibly destructive.

I have a CS degree. I read all my textbooks. In some math classes I read textbooks I wasn't required to in the library to help me understand things that I didn't understand in the official textbook.

Not CS, but I got a STEM degree from a top university. You read all the books to pass the course, and if you wanted an A, you also read the material on the suggested reading lists.

Same here. There was a fair amount illicit copying of textbooks too. But this teacher doesn't even want to share his lecture slides.

Did over 7 years of university at different levels and never ever bought a textbook.

Definitely not important, it mainly reflects on how are teachers choosing to disseminate their knowledge.