The Web never really replaced books as information sources for important things. The way to access most of the best stuff available via the Web is to... downloa

The Web never really replaced books as information sources for important things. The way to access most of the best stuff available via the Web is to... download ebooks, thus leaving the Web, if not just the "buy" button for real, physical books. The single most intellectually valuable website on the entire Web is very likely Library Genesis, where the only Web content is a catalog of books you can pirate by clicking a link, and it's, like, a lot more valuable than any other site (even Wikipedia). It may well be more valuable, in those terms, than the entire rest of the Web combined. If serious book publishers survive a while longer and if non-fiction books aren't overrun with dubiously-accurate AI bullshit, things won't actually change all that much, I think. As far as written content goes, the (public) Web is most useful for opinions or product discovery, and even those can already hardly be trusted because of all the marketing astroturfing. AI garbage barely changes that already-toxic dynamic. Video's another matter—some video content on the Web is great and has ~no at-least-as-good replacement anywhere else, in any other medium. But it's also all but completely monopolized by Youtube and hardly participates in or factors into the broader Web.