I've been repeatedly surprised and disturbed at how quickly one can hit "go get one of the five copies of this book if you want to know more" on any given topic

I've been repeatedly surprised and disturbed at how quickly one can hit "go get one of the five copies of this book if you want to know more" on any given topic, when researching online. You don't even have to go that deep. If you're lucky you can spend 30min digging around and find a scanned PDF on some foreign university library's site or something. If not.... [EDIT] and that's just when you can find out that there is something more to find. How many times does the Internet not even know—or if it does, not in any way you could reasonably find—what it doesn't know? I have a whole book that's just a list of works by and about T.E. Lawrence. Books, articles, introductions, collections, papers. It's the length of a normal book, and contains almost nothing but a list of works. It's a book-length bibliography. That's one guy. Granted, famous, but there are tons of people as or more famous/important as/than him. Plus all those topics that aren't single people. Buildings, movements, art works, events. The Web's smaller than one might hope.