not all documentaries are bad! they can be a great starting point for learning about any given subject. i like to watch them to see what the places are like, since most of them i’ve never been to, so to me it’s worth it for that even if the information is often pretty superficial. once you know a lot about something it can be fun to watch them and refute everything they say too 😝

books are nearly always going to be more in depth than a documentary would be. i dropped out of college years ago and have no plans to go back, but i spend a hefty chunk of my free time doing historical research. i read books, watch documentaries, read reddit posts and forums, look at photos on pinterest, look up various translations, and try to dig through any archives i can find online. i’m fairly well versed in the subjects i’m passionate about and i’ve never felt my lack of college classes when it comes to what i’m learning.

That depends on what your goals are. Documentary films are light and entertaining but they're also correspondingly light on information; they can serve as a brief overview of a topic but not much deeper than that. Books just have far more information, and reading them takes more concentration and work. Nobody ever got a degree just from watching films (even my brother who has a degree in Film Studies; which actually involves as much reading as any humanities subject)

There are of course very different kinds of books. At the least-heavy end you have books written by someone (who could be a historian but not necessarily) basically giving their personal take on stuff, with out many sources or even arguments/explanations for why they think something was a certain way. Then you have books aimed at a popular audience but which are a bit more academic; they explain the 'whys' in greater detail, and admit more uncertainties. They'll hopefully also have some historiography; explaining how different historians past and present have viewed a thing. Then there's the academic history stuff like intro textbooks that give a broad overview but have a lot of sources and footnotes, and then there's as spectrum from that to books on research topics which are more narrow and more rigorous.

These different kinds of books correspond to different audiences. Some people who like history are largely into popular history and they like narratives. In a choice between two versions of an vent, they'd prefer you just choose the one that fits the story better and not present them with the choice, much less get bogged down in a discussion of the evidence and merits of the accounts. At the other end of the spectrum, the professional historian might write a whole book just discussing that question alone. They're not in the storytelling business.

A lot of people (including historians) are interested in reading about history at the pop-history level. But reading them doesn't get you closer to being a historian, i.e doing the research; dealing with sources directly and evaluating them and so on. Just as reading Stephen Hawking's bestselling pop-physics book A Brief History of Time doesn't really get you any closer to being able to solve the Einstein Field Equations. You are reading a book about the results of research, not engaging in the research.

Not that there's anything wrong with that! Just because you love music doesn't mean you want to learn to play an instrument, or would love doing so. Loving reading about history doesn't necessarily mean you love doing historical research, nor learning how to do it.

There's nothing wrong with loving history documentaries and pop-history books. That's where most people's interest lies. But if you want to study the stuff at a more academic level, then that doesn't just involve reading about the topic but also reading about historiography, about how you do history. Both the practical (languages, paleography, using archives and libraries etc) and the theoretical (historiography, theories of history etc).

Only you can say what you find interesting.