I don’t think physical print is worth the trouble of using it anymore. Electronically-obtained information is superior to physical information storage (aka paper) in every way. Society needs to rethink their assumption about printed material being more qualified or having more worth than internet material.
I’m currently in college, again. I’ve already worked in my field of study for almost 5 years, and I can tell you everything I learned was from Google. Anything I needed to know, I found through watching youtube videos, reading forum posts, Stackoverflow questions and answers… Ultimately no knowledge I gained from college was worth anything to me, save for the piece of paper that says that I’m scholastically competant.
Many of my classes involve writing a report of some kind, one that requires me to cite where I got my data from. This usually isn’t that big a deal… minimum of 5 sources, etc. etc… Except when the professor says this: “2 of those sources need to be from a hard copy. This could be a book, or a magazine, or newspaper clipping.”
Whenever I hear that requirement, my mind immediately translates that into what it actually means: “We need to justify actually having books in our school library.” Come on, let’s face it… who actually uses their school library (or their public library, for that matter) to get actual books? Maybe books on tape, but 9 times out of 10 they’re there to use the public computers. Libraries now are glorified computer labs. Why bother searching for a book on the topic you’re looking for when you can use the computer they provide to google the information?
There are a few things wrong with books…
They’re impractical. With any article or site, I can search for what I need to find on the site to get to the place I need to be via a text search. I can’t CTRL+F on a book to find what I need. Not only that, but the book’s condition fades over time, leading to missing pages and missing data. If you’re reading a fictional story, is it me or does having to turn the page break the immersion of the story? “And then, with a knife in his hand, Jim” wait, need to turn the page, “cut the turkey cleanly for his family.” There’s this needless breakup of data here between pages, and all it does is break the flow of reading.
They lack insight. Let’s use guitar strings as an example. I can read a fictional story about a rock star, look up the definition of guitar strings in a dictionary, look up the history and etymology of guitar strings in an encyclopedia, and maybe even get some information about good guitar strings from a magazine that’s paid to promote certain strings (i.e. not actual insight). A google search, however, will take me to the same places a lot faster, as well as taking me places where actual people just like me have looked for the same thing and have noted their findings. I can get insight as to which guitar strings last longer, which sound better, and which are most affordable all from a google search. I can’t get any of that from a search in my local library.
They’re intimidating. Books come at you with this thickness of many many pages. A website breaks its data up into a less intensive display. Nobody wants to read a massive wall of text when they’re researching something, so why would I want to read a massive amount of pages in a book?
They’re unmaintainable. I can’t change a typo once the book’s been published. I can’t change any layouts, or add better pictures, nor add any better content to a book once published. A website, on the other hand, does allow me to do these things. In fact, I’ve edited typos and reworded things in this article alone multiple times since I’ve published it.
Teachers insist you find actual books and quote from them. Why? Why are books considered a qualified source of information? They’re lacking in almost every way as an efficient or intuitive source of information… Some teachers I have insist: no blogs! “Blogs are unqualified sources of information.” I completely disagree. A blog is written by someone, giving their personal thoughts and insight into something. The blog itself has nothing to do with qualification, rather the author is what’s qualified. I’m more willing to believe a blog written by Bill Gates about running a technology business than Joe Schmuckatelli’s personal blog. Is quoting Bill Gates in person more qualified than quoting his personal blog?
Some argue the whole point behind gathering resources from books for school assignments is to lead you through the motions of doing so. Once done, you now know how to quote information from a book and properly cite your source from it. I argue that’s a stupid lesson. Why learn how to do any of that, unless you absolutely have to? If I’m writing a report on something (let’s say hypothetically that I WANT to do this) and I happen to think this one book explains my point best, I can google how to cite the source. In fact, there are citation generators out there on the internet already that you can use that’ll do all the work for you. There’s nothing profound about knowing the exact format of a book citation. Most of my sources look like this >> URL. The only reason you’d want to learn how to put real citations in, and post proper footnotes, is because some English Literature douchebag is going to read it, and will get their panties in a bunch if it’s not in the perfect format. Why are you putting the citation there in the first place? Did we forget why that’s there? It’s there to link you back to the sources of information… where you got your information. Who cares if I didn’t perfectly cite with proper comma-separated points where the information came from. To be honest, the best way to cite your information, I think, is to post a link to the book on Amazon, and note what page it was on.
For the fictional stories out there, I can understand some people’s draw towards buying the actual book itself and reading it just for the experience of reading an actual book. The smell of the pages, the sounds of the pages turning, the feeling of that manuscript paper as you flip… I get it. There’s totally nothing wrong with that, if that’s really what you want to do. That all being said, I think the book should be a luxury. Why are books written first, and ebooks made as an afterthought? You realize people can come across your books a lot easier and a lot faster if they’re ebooks, right? Google searches will find them a lot sooner than they would if they only came in physical copies…
I’ll even argue that textbooks are worthless. Some people live by their textbooks, but I’ve never found textbooks worthwhile. Any technology course I’ve taken has a textbook full of glorified tutorials. The problem is that these textbooks and tutorials were written by someone who wanted to make money as a scholar, not by someone who really wanted to share their knowledge. I’d much rather read tutorials written by people who wrote it because they were curious once, and wanted to make sure nobody else finds whatever task they were trying to do as confusing ever again. That’s why I write tutorials of my own. I had to research like crazy to figure out how to do things, and the tutorial breaks it down into the pieces that I actually needed to do rather than all the extra crap that research will give you.
I don’t read magazines, nor newspapers, nor books. I have no need for them. I can get better insight on trends, topics, and products from customer reviews. I can get better up to date coverage of the news from browsing a variety of different news outlets rather than the one newspaper. I can get information on the history, worth, and use of things from youtube videos, user-drafted tutorials, and wikipedia’s citations. I can read stories a lot faster and enjoy them a lot more by scrolling down the page with my mouse wheel than flipping pages. I can also find my place a lot easier should I lose where I was reading. I can highlight text in a website and send it to people, rather than having to physically write it down. If I’m making a web document, I can use hyperlinks to bring people to more information rather than telling them where they can find it so they have to go and research it themselves.
This understanding of books and magazines as being qualified sources of information really needs to be explored again, because I have yet to see any superiority in them over using the internet.