Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

A few posts ago, I wrote about things that should go away.

I missed one: printed encyclopedias. Now that we have wikipedia, they seem a little useless, eh?

Even if you dislike the social, collaborative networking style of wikipedia, for the price of a set of encyclopedias ($1,395.00), you can purchase the encyclopedia on DVD ($39.95) 35 times over. You do the math. Wait, I already did the math.

And then we have a plethora (I like saying that word. Go ahead and try it. It’s fun), a plethora of free resources on the web. For example:

• Open textbooks (17,162 book modules in over 1000 books) at Wikibooks
• 18,000 free books at Project Gutenberg
• A few books are available from the Open Library
• worldebookfair.com has over 300,000 free ebooks until August 4th, 2006