Historically only a very small portion of the population was ever literate in history
Historically this depends on place and time period. For example see Novgorod Republic - Wikipedia or https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3huswa/how_literate_was_the_average_roman_citizen_did/.
high literacy is only a thing because the Prussian school model was useful for industrialization
And because before industrialization the vast majority of people was rural.
@PulkoMandy mentioned the advantages and disadvantages of e-books compared to books, but there is a fundamental difference: Some people, myself included, hate reading from screens, however said screens are customized trying to imitate paper. If it’s more than just a few pages, I would print it out (provided I will need to read parts of it more than once). It’s just much better for the eyes and more readable in general. Not to mention I can have it next to the armchair, ready to be read whenever I want, without worrying if the “book” is charged enough to last my reading session.
No e-book will ever have the look and feel of a real book. No dragging on a touch screen would ever replace flipping real pages. Analog is timeless, digital is ephemeral, good enough only until it is replaced by a new, more shiny model. That’s not “digitalophobia”, that’s said by someone who uses computers all the time.
Only at the top you will find some HAIKU related videos!
Please clean it up, admin!
Very elegant, indeed -
My first post here was related to the last haiku video.
Anyway -
I think , next time, if I want to share my opinion about a post, I would directly open an another thread to save the efforts of members to ask, admins to do relocations, as that my opinion may make other’s to reply to me and then may the unlucky topic turn a curve into another direction, and people must roll too much 
Yippi-yippi-yeah ! 
There are two separate issues here, disguised as “read”. Some of the discussion is about reading as opposed to other ways of acquiring the same information, e.g. videos.
Some of the discussion on the other hand is about whether we go for that information at all, or try to bluff our way through with the very minimum.
When I started with computers in the late 1970s, I read everything I could get. I hung out at the computer center library and read through manuals. Now I’m the one who tries to bliuff his way through without reading. You know why? Because I found out that information has little value. The books I read in that library were about NOS/VE, an operating system that we were running on our new CDC Cyber 180. (Well, that was early '80s), on FORTRAN, … I have a couple inexpensive books that I bought over the years - Java, maybe some stuff for my Amiga A3000.
It’s good to be able to dig up the information you need, from books or whatever, when you need it. If you don’t need it, it’s just wasting space in your life on things that aren’t going to matter in a few years, because the high tech world thrives on making your learning irrelevant.
That said, I have a 27 year old book here beside me, “Be Developer’s Guide” that is still reasonably useful knowledge that I am finding I could have done well to learn in a more systematic way. It’s one of the things I like about Haiku, though frankly I think this is more of a symptom of its obscurity - if Haiku starts drawing interest on the same scale as Linux, it will inevitably be subject to a more rapid rate of obsolescence. It’s just human nature.
As for videos vs. text … I can’t imagine. I’ve seen videos that are just a part sitting on a table, and a couple of hands making random gesticulations, while the guy talks. This is just text, in a less useful form. I can’t stand video documentation - my attention span is too short, could be.
Since the internet invaded & now dominates the mainstream, it really looks like (to me) that the average depth of knowledge about so many things has continued to become shallower.
Many people, when they want to know about something just read the wiki & stop there. Superficial, not always correct, sometimes biased, & few readers look further to verify what they have read or to get another view on it.
We live in the shallows.
I don’t really accept that as a fatality. It is a choice of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, and even there, you can find some very traditional-minded distributions and tools that don’t change things so fast. However, I think a lot of people expect to have both the “new and shiny” and the stability of a system that is in maintenance mode and does not change. You can’t really have both at the same time.
In any case, it is possible to build projects that one day become “complete” and require few changes and a little maintenance. This has somewhat of an upfront cost to build things correctly from the start, and maybe take 2 or 3 failed attempts before you can do it properly.
In Haiku I’m not sure there is a lot of willingness to change everything. Personally, I would love to call the OS “done” and move on with applications and other projects. But I would need another lifetime for that 
. First we have to get to R1. And then probably to R2 where we fix some major legacy problems from BeOS. That’s quite a lot of work ahead already.
I hope for the best - the energy to keep the project current, and the good sense to keep what works and not break stuff. The phenomenon I’m thinking of is really far out of the scale of what we can expect with Haiku - I’m looking at Windows, Linux etc., where there’s a rather vast ecosystem of would-be architects, on one hand, and on the other hand herds of specialists whose advantage is served by ever increasing complexity. They don’t want a simple, straightforward architecture that’s fast and reliable, they want a `rich’, evolving pile of [stuff] that they can have unique mastery of. Computer programming languages, large software packages, whatever, always the same thing. Unhealthy bloat is their natural destiny.