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Most books and articles are not available online. You will
still need to go to the library to read them and take notes.
And you may prefer to read printed sources even when they are
also available on computer.
- Most electronic texts of articles are devoid of formatting--
you get just plain typeface--often many screenfuls that you have
to search carefully to find what you want. Formatting in print,
on the other hand, makes it easy to skim material. You can read
selected passages in a long article, noting headings,
illustrations, first and last paragraphs.
- You can browse in print, flipping through the table of
contents or index of a book, for example, or sampling a
middle chapter.
- Text-only electronic versions of articles are taken out
of the context of the original. However, graphics, other
articles and advertisements adjacent to an article in a
newspaper or journal can give you a broader sense of history
and culture.
- You can immediately tell the size of a book or article
in print, but it's difficult to get a sense of the length of
some computerized texts. You won't necessarily know even
when the size of the file is given (for example, 15K)
because some of those kilobytes may be for graphics.
(Without graphics, 15K is about 6 pages.) If the
information is given, note the pages an article covered in
its original form.
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