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Sure, most of us use email every day and do a bit of web-browsing of an evening but are we forgetting just how much this medium and the content it delivers has enhanced our lives?

I mean, how many times a week do you rush off to Google to find the answer to a question or to gather more information about something that has piqued your interest?

Can you remember back to the time when there was no Google (or any other search engine) and the average family's only source of reference was the (usually outdated) encyclopedia that they'd bought after being given the hard-sell by a door-to-door salesman?

Well I remember those days and I also recall just how useless (by comparison) those printed tomes were.

Not only was the content often out of date before it even hit your bookcase, but actually finding information within the pages of such a reference was a tedious and often unrewarding task.

Most multi-volume encyclopedia sets dedicated an entire volume to the index.

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Things got even worse if you were one of those diligent types who purchased the annual update to your Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever. Each of these updates compounded your search problems to the extent that you could spend hours tracking down just a few lines of information that was often not particularly illuminating anyway.

By comparison, the web is an awesome resource of a scale and depth that nobody could have even imagined just 20 years ago.

But is Google enough when you're trying to do some research on a particular subject?

I know that it's my first port of call when doing a search, however I frequently run my queries through several other search engines as well because sometimes the throw up stuff that Google has either not indexed or has given a very low ranking.

Dictionary.com is another site that gets a bit of a thrashing from me when I'm busy. Once again, it's just far more convenient to use this online resource than it is to thumb through the pages of a printed dictionary.

So has the web (and the CDROM) made printed encyclopedias and other reference works redundant?

I'm one of those people who just love the "presence" that only the hardcopy printed word can create -- but I have to admit that I haven't bought any reference books in over a decade.

15 years ago I would spend $100-$200 a month on technical and reference books but these days they just don't seem to be worth the money. Every year I'd have to make or buy another large bookcase to hold my ever-growing collection of stained tree-pulp -- but not now.

When publishers began adding a CDROM to such books it did extend their life somewhat but these days, even the addition of such a disk doesn't entice me to buy -- because I know that most of that information can be had online for free.

While I'm sure that recreational readers will not be forsaking the printed book for many years to come (having a good read while lying in the bath just isn't the same if you run the risk of dropping your laptop or e-book reader in the water), I really think that the day of the printed reference is rapidly drawing to a close.

And as a book-lover, that makes me kind of sad.

Oh well, at least the greenies will be happy.

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