TWENTY FIVE years ago this month the world wide web was born.

Most browsers in a bookshop in 1989 would have been oblivious to the paradigm shift taking place in Building 31 at CERN on the Swiss-French border, but much has changed since then which has had a dramatic effect on the way we seek information.

Back then, printed books were the lead repository of information, and when you asked a bookshop to find out if something was available, they looked it up on microfiche, scrolling through sheets of micro-text, the words enlarged and focused on the inside of a plastic monitor.

It was a different age, but was it better?

Information is now available with such immediacy that we have the potential to be better informed than at any time in history.

Much of that information leads to further reading – in real books.

Contrary to popular belief, sales of printed books have grown in recent years.

This may be because we trust books over ‘user-generated content’, and we gain pleasure from a printed page which is hard to replicate on a back-lit screen.

Those real books are available from real bookshops – search engines in the real world.

It may take a little longer to perform the search, but the search will be pleasant and it’ll involve all your senses – plus you’ll have real people with a passion for books to help you along the way.