The internet is creating significant change in society and it's happening much faster than anyone could have anticipated. Whether this change is good or bad depends on who you are exactly but it appears that in the end it will be a net good. The internet makes distribution of information extremely easy and cheap for anyone to do. Businesses that have traditionally profited on publishing and distribution will be most affected. As a result organizations like book publishers, newspapers, and the music industry are going to have to institute significant changes in their business models if they want to stick around.
It will be interesting to see how libraries are transformed by this change. It's much easier and cheaper for everyone to distribute books in electronic form.
It doesn't make sense anymore to have to go to a library to do research. Professors often require students to pull sources from other places from the internet for research. Does this really make any sense? Most serious scientific journals are available online, what's the point in requiring students to spend hours in a library to find the same information? Learning to use a library is not a valuable skill, at least not anymore. There is absolutely no chance that the internet is going to disappear. This is a similar argument that teachers used to have against calculators in math classes. Now that we have them we can spend our time focusing on understanding higher level concepts rather than dealing with the rote minutiae of manual symbol manipulation. In the same sort of way, the internet lets us get to the information we need instantly so we don't waste our time wandering aimlessly through a dusty old library trying to work the Dewey decimal system. Sorry Mr. Dewey but we really don't need you any more.
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