I began to form a generalization that the Net was better for currently breaking issues than it was for older questions which had been the focus of serious scholarly thought. Authors in the 1990s will most often seek publication of their best work in hard copy journals and magazines. It is rare that they would start by posting them to the Net, especially since publishers are reluctant to print such electronically compromised articles. The best thinking on topics such as the Cuban Missile Crisis is probably still captive of the old technology. Until someone purchases the electronic rights to those articles and books with an eye toward making them available on the Net, we may still find the book the best place to start our inquiry regarding certain questions.
Books provide synthesized information . . .
Because most of us grew up with hard copy books serving a central role for research we conducted from high school on, most of us probably haven t stopped to think very long about their advantages over the kind of material available on the Internet. A carefully crafted book on a complex non-fiction question is often the result of someone spending 18 months carefully collecting and then culling thousands of documents in order to distill all that information down into a relatively compact parcel we call a book. If we want to evaluate Kennedy s leadership, we can consult half a dozen books, find the authors opinions, weigh their evidence and build out own case. If we tried to conduct the same inquiry from scratch, it might take us 18 months to sort through the Info-Glut. Good books have done the sorting for us.