Still using books?

Better get back to blogging about the presentations soon, but until then just another quick thought I had.

I was quite surprised to see a number of vendors selling books at Dconstruct07. There were even some prizes at the end that consisted of piles of books.

For quite sometime now I have been living an almost bookless existence. Working on the assumption that I usually have online access, I don't appear to have any difficulty finding information I am after online. This applies to computer programming and language learning.

I don't dislike books, and still read them for plesure, however if I wanted to learn about Ajax or CSS or Java, I would certainly turn to the Internet first, and may even end up reading an online book, or a tutorial, or a reference...

Maybe most people would still rather go straight to a book, something tactile that
they can hold.