The internet is a reference library, brilliantly adapted to looking something up, creating inventories, updating catalogues, adding new entries in a dictionary or an encyclopedia, and consulting directories. The web serves to store knowledge that would be costly in paper, in volume, to print: references, appendices, background sources, documentation of a detailed kind, extra apparatus in general.

But I don't think that writing and reading as acts of imagination can exist in cyberspace only; words don't become flesh for me unless I print out and read the materialised text; but even so, the uniform, ugly look of the copies does not draw me into the mood of the work and its meaning or imprint its contents on my memory as deeply as reading it in a book.

I believe computers should never be thought of as replacements for books; libraries should not become workstations; the emphasis on teaching through the use of personal computers and downloaded documents has contributed gravely to the psychological and cognitive difficulties of students and younger people, with serious consequences for all of us.