I love this stuff. Free, high quality information is so powerful. I wonder what the world will be like when people have always had instant access to any information they desired.

Free, high quality, powerful information has been available for quite a long time at your local public library. Now it's just at your fingertips. An improvement, yes, but nothing that new.

There's a lack of high quality, powerful information on the internet, which I think is one of it's biggest problems. One major exception I can think of right off the bat is Wikipedia. But books are thought of as high quality because it is assumed that if someone went through the trouble of publishing it, there has to be a good reason. Perhaps that won't remain the case with free, online books. However, free books, I think, are still much better information than scattered web pages. The internet is also accessed by many more people than libraries. What this does is put more books into the domain of more people. There are also communities whose libraries are... less than adequate. I think Columbus Public's library system is pretty awesome compared to what I've got out here. I've been to Detroit's main library and it's just scary.

And! Libraries are less than helpful when it comes to textbooks, since even if they have a copy, and even if it's the latest copy, there's not enough for everyone.

Also, putting information at your fingertips is MUCH more powerful than it would seem. When we all have google in our brains, it won't be that search engines are a new thing.

See, libraries aren't good enough. Besides there not being enough copies, their variety is poor when compared to the Internet.

It's hard to find books about making chain mail armor, playing with electronic music or contact juggling - all things I learned how to do just from the Internet.