Comment by TheOtherHobbes
2 years ago
I had the Marshall Cavendish Tree of Knowledge - a collectible encyclopedia week by week.
This is one of the few areas where paper really wins. You get concentrated information in one physical object with hard boundaries which arrives on a regular slow schedule. You have plenty of time to read it thoroughly and start thinking and imagining.
The web is a constant hurricane of distractions. Wikipedia has far more information than any paper encyclopedia, and in a superficial sense it's far more accessible. But there's always more, and always something else. You firehose it, forget most it, and don't get the bigger picture or the implied narrative linking everything together.
I had the same thought. I initially believed that the Web would be the replacement for the Catalog, but it really isn't - it lacks curation. I've never really found any place on the Web with a similar level of curation; maybe OpenCulture, but even that's kind of a firehose. If anyone knows of any places out there, I'd love to hear recommendations.
There's another benefit of an encyclopedia set of books over Wikipedia: in the physical process of looking up a desired topic in a book, you can stumble upon COMPLETELY unrelated topics as you flip through the pages. This serendipitous effect led to reading random encyclopedia articles for HOURS as a kid, an interaction that's hard to replicate with Wikipedia today. Sure there's Wikipedia:Random [0], but you have to intentionally access it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random