A must read, not just for the piece itself but the vigour of the comments below it!

The simple fact is that the romance of the printed book outlives the demonstrable usefulness of printed books in any particular discipline, and it dies very, very hard. To be clear: I’m not saying that printed books have outlived their usefulness, only that when they do outlive it, the romance lingers on.

via The Digitized Book Corpus and the Cracking Dam « The Scholarly Kitchen.