Many books are unnecessary in the age of Wikipedia

Throughout my life I’ve always collected books. Lots of books. As in, thousands of books. This made moving hell, of course, but it was worth it to me to have all that knowledge within arm’s reach, especially when I was teaching English to high school students back in the 1990s.

Now, however, I have an iPad. I have the Web. I have an iPhone that’s always connected to the Net. And so, after my latest—and hopefully last, for at least several decades—move into a new house with my wife, I’ve been purging my books for the first time in decades. If I have a book electronically already, or if it’s easily available electronically (thank you, Archive.org & Google Books!¹), I’m either selling it or giving it away.

But here’s the interesting thing to me. I was looking through books on philosophy & psychology to see if I wanted to keep them or not:

• Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy: 36 Systems
• The Philosophy and Literature of Existentialism
• Makers of Modern Social Science: Sigmund Freud
• Basic Teachings of the Great Philosophers
• An Outline of Psychiatry
• Seven Theories of Human Nature

As I picked up each book, judging whether or not I should keep it, I found myself thinking the same thing each time: “Heck, for what I need to know, I could just look on Wikipedia.” Obviously, if I was a professional, or in school, actively studying (or teaching, for that matter) these subjects, it would be a different story. But for me, a former English teacher turned technologist, a person who’s always wanted to know at least a little something about everything, Wikipedia is more than enough.

Living in the age of Wikipedia—& the cheap devices & almost-ubiquitous Internet that makes it always available—is an awesome thing. It’s opened up knowledge to almost everyone in the world, but perhaps more importantly (for me, anyway!), it’s allowing me to divest myself of a lot of books that I just don’t need any longer.