Having lost an eye in recent times, reading stuff on-line is much easier for me than most print and so I read very little print any more.  Obviously copying and pasting and following interesting links/lines of enquiry is also much easier on-line.  I would be an advocate of giving every school kid a laptop and digitising a lot of course materials but that is largely because teaching is of such variable quality and invariable aimed at some notional average or lowest common denominator which rarely suits most people.

Having said all that, I think the school library is still one of a school's most important resources and a love of books is a quite distinct accomplishment to doing on-line research/learning.  There is an unavoidable social aspect to learning and creating a learning environment and a physical book is still something to be cherished.  Bizarrely, it is still one of my life's ambitions to write a book even though I now rarely read them from cover to cover.


notes from no w here