Thoroughly mixed feelings here. As computer-geeky as I am, I have literally made use of my dead-tree encyclopaedia exactly once in the last seven years[1], so

Thoroughly mixed feelings here. As computer-geeky as I am, I have literally made use of my dead-tree encyclopaedia exactly once in the last seven years[1], so I would have a very hard time justifying to anyone why they should spend money on buying anything like that. On the other hand, I do actually still have the encyclopaedia on my bookshelves, and I would never want to give that up. I'm fairly young (32) but old enough to have been raised believing that any household with even the pretensions of education simply must have an encyclopaedia on its bookshelf (and visible, at that). Having it in physical form has an almost talismanic value. So yeah. I'd kind of love to have a dead-tree OED on my shelves. But I'd rarely use it and it's pretty hard to justify the cost in any remotely rational terms. [1]It was during an internet outage and I wanted to know the latitude of southern Scotland, so that I could calculate roughly when sunrise would be in mid-December, because this turned out to be plot-relevant in a suspense novel I was reading at the time. The whole enterprise was outrageously geeky.