I hope I never have to say "paper" books

I spent this afternoon in the stacks at Harvard's Widener Library. For some reason I felt the need to be surrounded by old books. It was probably caused by writing about ebooks the other day. I love books, and Widener is one of the world's great libraries, although finding things can be a challenge. At Widener they laughingly refer to the Dewey decimal system as the "new classification scheme." But then Harvard people like to remind you that the university was there before America was a country.

My favorite part of Widener is D West, which is the farthest section in the library's sub-sub-sub-basement, not a place for the claustrophobic. The smell of old books is something I've loved since my father started taking me to used-book stores in New York and Philadelphia as a child, and this smell seems strongest in D West. Perhaps it is because this is where they keep the old magazines, like Punch and Harpers Weekly. Selecting a shelf at random I found myself in front of the First Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica dated 1771. They have stuff like this sitting on the shelves for anyone to read. Last year I had a bet going with the other grad students to see who could take out the oldest book. The best I ever did was a book on comparative anatomy by Couvier dated 1796. The Britannica was for in-library reference only, so I sat down and browsed through it.

I soon realized that this was exactly what I was yearning for. In this Google age we have come to believe that it is possible to find the "best" answer to a search. Sitting with this centuries-old book drove home the idea that there is no right answer, there are just answers that fit the context of their time. For example, the entry for America was only one paragraph long, and described it as "one of the four continents" with an indigenous population of "copper-coloured" natives. My favorite entry was for buccaneer, which described them in the present tense and seemed to have a sense of national pride (Britannica was published in Scotland) at the way they harassed the Spanish navy. Google, on the other hand, thinks they are a football team from Tampa.

This doesn't mean that Google is wrong. I'm sure most people looking for Buccaneer today do want the football team. The problem is that search engines in general make it impossible to recognize the changing context of information. I can't ask the Web "what did people mean by a particular term in the 18th century, or the 19th?" Soon even the 20th century will be overlaid by a new set of best answers. Once Google indexes all the world's books, will their algorithms determine the best answer to every question?

For some reason this makes me incredibly sad. Was my generation the last one to get most of its education from books? Even worse, will I live to see the time when the qualifier "paper" books will be necessary, just like the snide use of "snail mail" to differentiate it from email?