Because in it's in a book doesn't necessarily mean it's not trash, and there is certainly no reason contemporary digital prose can't be first rate, but the mere mechanical process of publishing, difficult and expensive, and to a certain extent, regulated by both market and "peer review", does form a first line BS filter the blogosphere lacks. Also, by its very nature, old books have been around for a while and the very fact they are still being issued in new editions offers some bonafides as to their content and acceptance.

But even more so than the actual content is the importance of the attitude, or philosophy imparted by the book, which I believe is lacking in other forms of literature, including the blog essay. I'm sure you know that someone who's wasted his youth reading science fiction (like most of us here!) actually thinks DIFFERENTLY than those who haven't, even when compared to others trained in the space sciences and astronautics but without the SF background. It's not the facts or data in those books that we absorbed, its the attitudes and ideas, the mindset that is transmitted by literature. To the science fiction reader, there is a philosophy or Weltanshaung that is important to our lives and thought that has guided our interests and careers, and brought us to this place, no matter how diverse we may otherwise be. When you read a good book it changes you, even if you can't quite put your finger on how or why. It educates you, even if later in life you change or mature and reject its theses.

These ideas are not entirely my own, BTW, I have been reading a superb book lately during my bus rides "A History of Education in Antiquity" by H.I. Marrou (1956), a gift from my cousin Bobby the Red, that studies in depth this topic (where Marrou dug up all his scholarly data I'll never know). I can see now how our Western educational system has evolved since the Minoan Age, Dorian invasion through Hellenistic and Roman times up into the middle ages and the present. It is a product of our civilization, and it is a purely cultural product. This is why we are different from other cultures, for better or worse.

The Greeks understood this all perfectly, although books were expensive for them, and they had little literature at the beginning outside Homer and Hesiod. They made up for it in other ways, integrating other subjects such as athletics, rhetoric, mathematics, music, philosophy and so on. They understood perfectly this idea of learning something because it teaches you how to think and how to learn, not just how to do something. They were an intensely practical people; warriors, farmers, merchants, seamen, politicians, lawyers, builders, but they understood the value of pure thought alone.

This is what books do for you. For a short time someone else, the author, controls your mind and you see an alternative to your own thought, a different way of seeing the world. Even if you reject the book, or even forget it altogether, it becomes part of you forever.