No. Was this halucination before or after they released you from the asylum?

But James, isn't the difference that in a library the entire content has been pre-screened for academic, literary, scientific or some other worthy value. Godwin is basically saying that even a casual stroll through the contents of a library is bound to be more informative than a similiar perusal of what is found on the internet. Let's face it, without the ability to discern credibility people who rely exclusively on the internet are going to be just as misinformed as those who rely exclusively on Fox News.

Regarding the indexing observation, there is a big difference between Google and a library: Putting a book in a library incurs significant costs to lots of people. The author must write a book good enough to be picked up by a publisher who is credible enough that libraries search its new publications list. The library must then purchase and catalog the book.

Online "information", by contrast, can be generated in moments by any crackpot and put on the Web at essentially no cost. And Google will eventually pick it up.

Why? It's cheaper, easier, faster, and more convenient for everyone. It's far easier to look up a book online versus hiking down to the library, or waiting for it to be shipped from an online bookshop. And it makes vast reams of information truly available to everyone for the first time.

The remaining barriers are the public's acceptance of reading online, and willingness of the publishers to scrap this "DRM" nonsense in favor of something which is of genuine benefit for the consumer. The first will disappear as our current generation of kids grows up. The second will take a lot longer.

It's silly for me to talk about DRM, however, since I cannot possibly anticipate what electronic publishing will be like in 2050. There's a lot of research being done into "smart paper", for example, and that may be the way things go. That will entail some fundamental changes.

One of the results is that libraries will become an anachronism (but the librarian's job will be more important than ever!), and that's possibly where his objections are based. Librarians can either accept what's going to happen and make the best of it, or fight against it and lose anyway.

IMO the search engines aren't doing that bad a job, and they're slowly getting better. Much of the trick from getting good results from Google is learning how to take advantage of its strengths, and for kids who grow up with it this'll be a totally natural thing. I am also firmly convinced Google and its kin and are will spur ever more research into natural language processing, and we'll see some pretty impressive results in the next 5-10 years.

Don't get me wrong, I love books and am a true bibliophile. But I see huge advantages in publishing our storehouse of information online, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can easily look up any old book I want and read it.