Most books and articles are not available online. You will still need to go to the library to read them and take notes. And you may prefer to read printed sources even when they are also available on computer.
- Most electronic texts of articles are devoid of formatting—you get just plain typeface--often many screenfuls that you have to search carefully to find what you want. Formatting in print, on the other hand, makes it easy to skim material. You can read selected passages in a long article, noting headings, illustrations, first and last paragraphs.
- You can browse in print, flipping through the table of contents or index of a book, for example, or sampling a middle chapter.
- Text-only electronic versions of articles are taken out of the context of the original. However, graphics, other articles and advertisements adjacent to an article in a newspaper or journal can give you a broader sense of history and culture.
- You can immediately tell the size of a book or article in print, but it's difficult to get a sense of the length of some computerized texts. You won't necessarily know even when the size of the file is given (for example, 15K) because some of those kilobytes may be for graphics. (Without graphics, 15K is about 6 pages.) If the information is given, note the pages an article covered in its original form.
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