Here I am, furi­ously study­ing for my MSc, when a thought struck me.

Given that this is a course on digital mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tions, why has my book col­lec­tion increased over the past few months?

In fact, the course is set using two core text books. When I’m in the train­ing or pre­par­ing my notes for the activ­it­ies and assign­ments, I use a book. Obvi­ously I am scour­ing the Web for rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion but ulti­mately I col­lect together the per­tin­ent notes in a book. I even (for­give me) print out some of the PDFs or longer web pages that I find of use. The emphasis of the course — and one of the main focuses of my job — is digital so why would I put so much reli­ance on prin­ted matter?

I can’t speak for any­one else on this mat­ter, but for me there is some­thing won­der­ful about hav­ing a tan­gible product in your hand that you just can’t get online. Let’s con­sider a few things:

  1. I can sit and read a book without wor­ry­ing about the bat­ter­ies run­ning out.
  2. I can sit in bed and read a book without wor­ry­ing about the heat from it set­ting the duvet on fire.
  3. I can read things in the car, on a train or on a plane without hav­ing to plug any­thing in.
  4. I can doodle and scribble my notes any­where I like on the page (I’m a visual per­son, it’s just how my brain works)
  5. I don’t have to wait for a book to boot.

How­ever, there are some ser­i­ous draw­backs to using books, espe­cially for studying:

  1. Any stat­ist­ics (espe­cially if they are related to digital inform­a­tion or tech­niques) become out of date as soon as the book is printed.
  2. Web links have to be phys­ic­ally typed into the address bar instead of just clicked on.
  3. You end up with box files full of sheets that are dif­fi­cult to col­late and organise.
  4. Big text books are heavy!
  5. You can’t search a book for key words (okay, you can but not in such a con­veni­ent way).

Print isn’t going to dis­ap­pear any time soon, even with the avail­ab­il­ity of e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iPad (okay, maybe for news con­tent that needs to stay fresh and rel­ev­ant) — books are just so much more con­veni­ent to use. But when a book takes advant­age of the bene­fits of both medi­ums there is sud­denly far more value. Use the prin­ted ver­sion to put across com­plex ideas that are easier to digest in this format and sup­ple­ment any data with online con­tent that can be eas­ily updated. Best of both worlds!

But that’s just my opin­ion. What do you think?