This medium is a useful tool, but it has released me from nothing. Sure, it is handy and has many uses. I look up information every day about Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque composers, and am glad I can, yet I just bought a new book on British batlleships from 1905-1920, and it is full of information not available online at all.

Things on the web can only be trusted as far as the people who put them there can be trusted. I'll keep my books, thank you, and I'll keep buying them.

Exactly. The hoops that one has to jump through with publishers and distributers usually results in the printed medium being more reliable than the digital one. Any fool can put up a website. It is much harder to get a book published.

I personally prefer a paper book myself. However I find myself reading much more online than I do offline and I don't see that abating. There are almost no barriers to publishing now. The trend that has started with e-Books continues to grow and ultimately will overtake and supersede paper based books despite our generations wish that it won't.

My post was highlighting the humour I found in the situation.

Certainly each form of media has flaws in and of it's own. I would believe books would contain more factual information than say Wikipedia. I like my books as well. I have downloaded a few to read but it just seems to be missing something.

Tekada:
Copyright infringement. Plagiarism, etc. These keep one honest.

Yes sir it sucked. Students could not purchase used books at a lower cost. One semester I went to Laurel Raceway. I parlayed a few dollars into $250.00 betting on the ponies. I paid for my college books that semester on the good fortune of fast horses. :D

The advent of the Internets Tubes has enabled people to access data much quicker. Whether that data is actual information is uncertain.

I have books in my personal library that are well over 100 years old. I have film images also from the 19th century.

When it is demonstrated that a digital copy of a book or photograph can easily survive 100 years, then, I might start to think that paper is an obsolete storage medium.

Until then, I will be happy with my dead trees. :yep:

If the infos are in printed or digital form makes no difference regarding its truth, though I prefer holding a big book in a comfy chair to reading long texts on a monitor.

However the biggest annoyance regarding the web is often the lack of source material. Hell, there are even news sites out there where they don't show a date in the article, unusuable for serious research. :mad:
Still too often, (news) sites show a disregard for the hyperlink abilities of the net. When I read something about say a speech, I am one of those guys who want to dig deeper when it interests me. Would it kill the journalists to link to the original speech?
Same goes about articles about scientific papers. Thanks, journalists for editing the infos and explaining discoveries to the public, but put a freaking link at least to the abstract! This way the interested reader can check out how much truth the article contains and how much is just exaggeration to create "news".

@Platapus: here are two pages full of porn which you'll certainly appreciate:
http://www.flavorwire.com/254434/the...s-in-the-world
http://www.flavorwire.com/346427/dre...-who-love-them
:know:

That's what I was saying regarding the books I buy. If I can find the information online, I'll use it. I have found some wonderful sites regarding ships and weapons, including information I couldn't find anywhere else. That said, nobody has the information Burt, Friedman, Roberts, Campbell and their like put into their books. It's just not there.

Ah, hyperlinks - the bane of my existence. Not that I don't love them, especially when I'm doing research on a specific composer. The problem is that many of those Wiki articles do put in links, and I end up following them for hours, far beyond what I had planned on.

Stefan, I really wish you'd stop linking to...

Oh, that kind of porn! Good stuff! :rock: