[AWoodside]

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I miss the days when you had to go to a library to get knowledge. There's something about having it at your fingertips and in a highly ephemeral form that makes knowledge less meaningful.

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Perhaps the fact that it is at your fingertips just makes you realize that the vast majority of available knowledge is not, in fact, meaningful. For every meaningful page that gets written there are probably thousands of pages of tripe. When pages in general used to be difficult to acquire the subjective value people placed on them may have been artificially inflated. Supply and demand and all that.

Also, how old are you guys anyway? I actually prefer reading on a computer screen and download pdf books all the time. For awhile I still bought books in paper-form because I like to read in bed and it can be cumbersome to cuddle with a laptop. Recently, however, I've found a better solution. I made a private little website for myself where I put up full length books I'm currently reading so that I can read them on my iPhone in bed (iPhone sucks at pdf files right now).

I do agree that at times it can be easier to do serious research at a library (although I may be biased because the school I just finished had arguably the best library system in academia) but this is going to quickly become a thing of the past.