Quote:
Originally Posted by
Tesseract
One thing I really enjoyed as a kid was reading the encyclopedia. There were so many interesting topics, and so many fascinating topic juxtapositions, that I could be engrossed for hours in one volume. At one time I had a CD-ROM version of Encarta, and it was a total piece of crud. It lacked the sort of detailed discussion I was used to getting out of an encyclopedia, and was barely more than a dictionary with pictures. Plus, it was harder to browse topics just for fun. So I do think I'd like a good set of paper encyclopedias when I own a home with lots of bookshelves like the one I grew up in.
OMG I did that too! As a teenager, when I was done with homework, I'd relax after school and on the weekends by leafing through the 1971 edition World Book Encyclopedia! I picked up lots of little trivia that way.
My mother still talks about like I'm weird or something.
Anyway, I certainly do use a paper dictionary. Especially since I'm on dial-up at home and it's easier to pull a book off the shelf than dial in and wait for dictionary.com or wiktionary to load. Although I do use those websites on occasion, especially when I'm at work and it's easier to just log onto the internet than get up and open the dictionary. I have other paper reference books, like a crossword puzzle dictionary (paperback, now split in two down the middle because I've opened it about 2 million times), a new Roget's thesaurus to replace the old edition I got back in the 6th grade (which I still have), etc. I even have the 1997 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, although I don't look at it much anymore, even for fun.
Wikipedia spoiled me; because it has a zillion entries constantly being updated, an article in a paper encyclopedia from just ten years ago can seem outdated. And with telephone directories, I have several of them because they just
come, but I rarely use them. I prefer to go online for that kind of information.