I've been around quite long enough to have watched some very valuable online resources in my field disappear one way or another. One major one has been restored in a new form; one is giving a kind of make-do access; but several seem to be done for good, some lost to hacking (which the people involved don't have time to repair), and some because the creators died or don't have the ability to move them to a new platform. Print books, and even microfiche and microfilm, are still readable. An individual library may lose its copy, but print interlibrary loan is still very valuable.

I use ebooks a lot in my work, less for fun. The insidious thing about ebooks is that libraries can't share them through ILL. So some new books are virtually inaccessible, because they were expensive and most libraries that bought them apparently have only electronic copies. This makes me very unhappy.

And I will fight anyone who thinks reading are wasting their time! Do people really think that? I guess if they asked it in the Friday Five, some people must, but I don't know if any of them are my friends!