The Internet is the ultimate enabler for an information junkie. I used to think that the greatest contribution Google made was making information easy to find, but I've come to realize that it's the stimulation of my curiosity and the prospect of near immediate gratification from learning something new that is the real benefit. It seems that the ready access to even the most trivial of facts has caused me to spend ever increasing amounts of time seeking out these little bits of knowledge. It gives me answers to questions I used to ask but never had expedient means of answering.
dogslife:
I'm not worried about the health of the book market. I work for a national book retailer and it's clear from my vantage point that the customer base is alive and kicking. My point is that healthy or not, this base is a tiny group of people and the money that the industry deals in is economically insignificant. Up, down, it's pennies either way. Mass phenomena in publishing just don't have the reach that they do in electronic media.