Please tell me I'm wrong, but... are you a... pdf reader? *gasp*

Looks like a page from Everyman's "Starting Out" series.

One of my highest rated correspondence wins on this site came after reading the first chapter in the KID Starting Out book, and adopting an idea for White. My opponent had no understanding of the position. He was later banned for engine use.

Lol!

I have a few PDFs yes. Most of my chess books are physical, though. (I also have one Kindle e-book, but it's my least favorite, because of the format...)

I used PDFs here, simply because it looks cleaner than taking a photograph of a physical page.

Ok good 

seriously though, it’s hard for me to read pdfs. Something about them just doesn’t click as well as physical books do.

Well yes, a 10 minute video would cover more than that one page. I agree with you there. But that's also just a single page, in a book of, perhaps, 200 pages or so ...

I don't have anything against videos. I just feel that books offer a lot more instruction, in a smaller package.

You could probably replicate the same amount of instruction as a quality book in video form, though you'd likely need many (Dozens? Perhaps more?) videos to do so.

(Also, I don't play out the variations, from a book, in my head. I keep a physical board next to me and follow along, by moving the pieces. I find this helps me retain the information better. Perhaps it's this interactive element that I most enjoy about books. With videos, such participation isn't really required ...)

No offense but this is a really dumb question.

This might relate to how some people learn differently than others.

If you Google "different types of learning", you'll see a variety of websites talking about the different learning styles that people may prefer.

I tend to learn best by physically doing something. So books work well for me, because they encourage me to follow along with a board, making the moves myself.

When I watch videos, I feel like something is missing ...

You might be more of a visual learner than I am, so videos would be more of a natural fit ... which might also explain why books, for the same reason, might not be the best approach for you.

Which is weird, because I have and still do benefit from them.

Pretty sure learning types or styles are mostly a myth; most people benefit from active learning (reading the book or watching the video WHILE taking notes or trying moves on digital/physical/mental board) instead of passive learning (just watching video, just reading the book from front to back, just listning).

Also pretty sure that chess masters don't have that much better generel memory than average people, just mouch better chess chunking.

I remember there was a study done by someone a while back in the 1900s. He got a bunch of masters and amateurs and set up the position and had them look for two minutes. Then, he’d give them an empty board and have them reconstruct them. 

On positions from actual games, masters did remarkably better. But when they were completely scrambled resembling nothing like a chess game, the masters did not do much better than amateurs, which suggests that they chunk the board differently from amateur players.

Out of all the possible positions you can achieve in a chess game, you mean to tell me masters “memorized” them all? Back in the 1900s?

@CooloutAC: you shouldn't roughly summarize anything, your reading comperhension is not up for that task. Playing and analyzing your games is good when you actually know what you're looking for and can understand why you did what you did. And for that we need books or videos or coaches. 

For chessmasters, they have task specific chunks for position, movements and so on. They have more chunks about chess and that's why they can remember chess better or recognize position better. In general memory tests, they are on average or just slightly better. Can find the specific study I am thinking about so this one will do: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34128184/

I've lost count of how many Everyman books in CBV format I've purchased in 2021. I know I've read all the way through Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals; Vukovic, The Art of Attack in Chess; Lakdawala, Capablanca: Move by Move; and McDonald, Chess Secrets: The Giants of Strategy.

I'm also currently working my way through several others in this format, as well as quite a few print and Kindle chess books.

Reading chess books is far more worthwhile and productive than watching chess videos. However, I struggled for years with the text layout and paucity of diagrams in the 1993 Cadogan Press edition of Vukovic. Buying the CBV version allowed me to read the entire book in a few weeks with my laptop on my lap and the print text beside me.

Saturday, I invested several hours of deep exploration of the first six positions in Thomas Engqvist, 300 Most Important Chess Positions, which I have only in print format. I find the reference game in the ChessBase database, save it to a separate database called 300 MICP, and record notes there. For one of the positions, I referenced another Everyman ebook: Jan Pinski, The Italian Game and Evans Gambit. For another position, I referenced two articles on D10 from ChessBase's Opening Encyclopedia 2021.

Books and other resources has never been an either/or proposition for me.

Below beginner level?

That's a little harsh. @CooloutAC has made hundreds of correct horsey moves here and on Lichess. But I agree the book that might give him the most help is https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Chess-Elementary-Problems-Players/dp/0671795015

I hope everyone will be buying my new book when its published "How to deal with Speedrunners in Online Chess" - its 9,000 pages, and as you can imagine when dealing with any figments of one's imagination , there is some controversy, for example some of the dosages of Haloperidol I recommend might seem extreme to some people.

As for other books, they are a great resource; I find videos can get bogged down quickly when they discuss more than two or three variations 5 or 6 moves deep from a certain position; so they can give you the general idea (and an enthusiasm for the ideas) but a book can use parenthesis or subsections/references to give more detail - and they are right there on the page. You can also make your own notes in books (even to a pgn of a games or games you've played....where the ideas have worked....or where you've misremembered the move order and hung mate in 1).

You can play through with your engine, or step away from the computer (shock horror!) and actually make the moves on the board, and really try and visualise what the author is saying - one thing I have been told is particularly good with a real board is to visualise (not move the pieces) at the key points in the text.

Cherniev and John Nunn's move by move books are great, as are many many other annotated game books. If you favour an opening finding a text on that and following through the example games will highlight ideas.

I would also say, we do live in the modern world and there are millions of resources, so everyone should choose the ones that suit them best - BUT suiting best does not necessarily mean those you find easiest, don't give up on the old fashioned seeming books just because you find them difficult - other reasons are fine (paper allergy, finding doubled vowels in words repugnant etc).

Using books with real board and pieces is active learning.

Watching videos, using software is passive learning.

The best summary of the BYP's failures that I've read.

However, generalizing this observation, which is on the mark for beginners, to apply it to those who are vastly better at elementary tactics is a pile of digested grass that passed through a bull.

As for not benefitting from analyzing the games of others, I present this recent game that I played here, having lifted it entirely from a book (Renaud and Kahn, The Art of the Checkmate, but I also found the idea in Lasker, Common Sense in Chess)

You math is off by more orders of magnitude than my math can compute.

See https://wismuth.com/chess/statistics-positions.html

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.”

― Eleanor Roosevelt