* Robert Dewar: >> People still buy books which are available freely in electronic form. >> This means that some printing still goes on. > > I think there is a difference between a novel you can hold and > read, and computer documentation. My question was not whether > anyone reads books any more, it was whether people read computer > manuals in this form any more.
I was still referring to computer documentation, but admittedly not reference manuals, rather works like introductory texts which have got some sort of narrative strucuture which guides the reader. For reference manuals, it takes a huge amount of effort to make the printed version as useful as a hypertext version, and most reference manuals don't go to that length, so I don't see a reason to print them either (as long as a there aren't licensing constraints that make printing seem favorable).
