Articles are good for getting into a field you are not familiar with, especially when that field is obscure and lacks good textbooks. The real problem is that

Articles are good for getting into a field you are not familiar with, especially when that field is obscure and lacks good textbooks. The real problem is that we are continuing to support an industry that contributes nothing at all to the publication of scientific papers. We simply do not need publishers of any kind, regardless of open access, because we have a substantially better way to distribute articles: the Internet. Sure, we need archives of articles, but that is what university libraries are for. Sure, bandwidth is needed for distribution, but that is where P2P systems like BitTorrent come in (imagine a monthly torrent of peer reviewed articles for each field). The rest is already being organized without the assistance of publishers.