Books
A picture may say more than a thousand words, but a thousand words allow you to dream up your own picture ... Isn't it fantastic that a handful of characters, when put in the right order, can describe anything anyone can think of, and still leave room for your own imagination? No matter how interactive games ever get, how many rendered movies they get or how much speak they have, they still lack in some aspects when compared to the written word. A rendered picture of a room, no matter how nice, is very real on the screen, you can't really change it at all. The carpet will have that lion pattern, no matter what you think of it, as will the wallpaper. A written description of a room on the other hand, allows you to dive in and think up all those more or less irrelevant details the words don't cover. In that way, a book can be said to be a lot more interactive than any game ...
An encyclopaedia must be as close as we can get to distilled knowledge. Sure, the web may be faster and more up to date. But still, it can't quite compete with the old-fashioned encyclopaedia. Browsing the web will never give the same
feeling as browsing a book. On the web you never get to see what lies between your starting point and the subject you were looking for, in books you do. I'm sure I'm not the only one
who has opened a book looking for one subject, and ended up reading something totally different and much more interesting. Also, there is no such thing as scrolling or loading times (unless you think
that page-flipping is an unbearable delay in the reading) and you don't have to read off a computer screen. Another plus is that very few books are over-designed ...
The web is, however, an excellent complement for the encyclopaedia, and it is also able to
provide information from many different points of view.
