Book versus Internet, the debate is going on for ages now. And unfortunately, the answer is yet to be found. This is because most people believe that adopting to new technologies is a must in today’s world which is true, but half of the population still beleives it can be the case with other stuff but not with education purpose. They believe like traditional and past days books still had an upper arm in
this world of growing technologies and internet.
Which is better fir research, the Internet or Books? Even though many have tried to find a definite answer it all seems to come down to a series of factors:
• The topic you’re researching
• How much tim you have
How in-depth you need your search to be
Obviously, both reading books and internet research hav q series of benefits and disadvantages when compared to the other. While the Internet has been around for decades, books have proven their value for centuries. So one of the first and most compelling arguments for reading books is that they have been used for hundreds of years as learning tools. Books are timeless and convenient. You don’t need any device , battery or a connection in order to open a book and start learning about the topic you’re interested in. While having such advantages books has some disadvantages as well.
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These include, it take a longer to do research using books than it does using internet. Books don’t have a search function, so finding specific information using keywords is impossible. The cost of using books for research can turn out to be quite high, depending on the topic. Whereas in case of Internet, it gives you access to more resources than you could ever absorb in a lifetime on any topic. The cost for Internet access now-a-days is quite low and usually, there’s no limit to how much you are allowed to explore. There’s disadvantages also, that you can’t trust everything you read on the Internet. We all learned that the hard way , especially in the past couple of years. The information is usually not structured as well as it is in books.
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Many times, despite the Internet being quicker, cheaper and sometimes more convenient, the winners of the Books versus Internet battle will be books. Here’s why. Let’s say you’re interested in learning a new skill . Maybe you’re thinking of a career change or you just want to explore a certain topic for different reasons. A simple search could provide some answers. You will find tens, hundreds of articles on different websites with a couple thousands words each, a handful of bullet points, guaranteed to help you achieve your goals. But barely scratches the surface of what you should be learning. A book will contain hundreds of pages of valuable information, structured in an easily understandable manner and with a lot more context, which will help you better understand the topic than a couple of bullet points.
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Do we learn more on the Internet than from Books? Well, nobody knows. Over the past decades, many things shifted towards the online environment, including education. Even though most of the school learning is still done with textbooks, the ratio of Internet vs Books research tends to favour the former. If we take into consideration how often we open up a browser to search for information and compare it with how often each of us opens a book to get that same information, it’s probably safe to assume that we do most of our learning online. All in all, there shouldn’t really be a battle of Books vs the Internet. We believe that the best results when it comes to research is combining both the two rather than sticking to only one. Combining book reading with online reasearch is bound to yield the best results.
By Manisha Parida
B.A English honours with Mass communication
Mats University, Raipur, (C.G)
