The format of “a book” is ancient, and it had to suffice when it was the only game in town. Surely, with our modern technologies and corresponding insight into UX, we can think of more efficient tools for learning. That much I agree with.
As someone who reads over 100 books a year — and who sometimes can’t even recall the title/author of the book I am reading at the moment — I admit that it’s embarrassing when I cannot describe a book I’ve just finished. However, this does not necessarily mean I haven’t learned anything. Sometimes it means I’ve absorbed the information so completely that it is already part of me, in the way that reading a poem changes the way you see the world even if you cannot recite the poem word-for-word. If I work through a nonfiction argument of science or history, whether it’s an argument I admire or reject, I’ve exercised my argumentative skills. I keep those skills even if I can’t regurgitate the statistics or cite the author. If I think I’ll want the statistics or the citation later, I can choose to make a note of them. If I pick up a book, it’s often because I’m curious “how the book works”: e.g. how novelists wrote in 18th-century England, what’s the complex political background of some alarming newspaper article I just read, how a living author is successfully marketing themselves. I can acquire an impression for my general knowledge bank of “how stuff works” without needing to remember anything specific about the book from which the knowledge came. After all, if a book is a vehicle for knowledge transfer, then the book itself is not as important as what it points to. If we are quizzing each other about “the book,” we are asking the wrong questions.
That said, yes, I do agree that the concept of “a book” is often not the best way to deliver information. It’s rooted in old assumptions (including classism and ableism) and old technologies. If books did not exist and we had to reinvent knowledge transfer methods given today’s technology, we’d probably develop something different. Interactivity often boosts retention, and learning styles are highly individual.
