I have been debating in my mind on the relative quality of articles and work on the web as opposed to that in books. I am partly engaged in this internal struggle because I am in the middle of writing a book that is based on a series of articles on European History I did on InDepthInfo, which in turn, are based on a course I taught to some homeschoolers.
At first, I thought that putting the book together would be a simple matter of copying and pasting the articles in a word document and then making a few edits and adding some other features and maybe an extra chapter or two. Yes, I did do all of that. However, the editing proved to be far heavier than I had anticipated. I had been satisfied enough with the articles to post them on the web, but I had not been satisfied enough with them to put them in a book. And why would that be?
Once the book is published, that’s it! I can’t change it. It is like writing in stone. I can’t add a comma, delete an awkward phrase, or insert a new paragraph. I once reviewed a history book where the word “throne” was misspelled “thrown”. I groaned every time I ran across it. I don’t want this to happen to my book, so where two edits might do for an article and one might do for a blog post, five or six is not too many for a book. All this editing, I believe ,raises the quality and quantity of the information.
Even so, the same thing that raises the quality of the initial book over the articles, is the same thing that allows the information and the writing to become dated. The online articles I can revise at will, and I often do. In fact, InDepthInfo is on a kind of editing cycle where articles are reviewed periodically for grammar and fact checking. I will especially dive into an article if I have had an email about it. This means that internet articles can be improved over time - but will they necessarily? I would say that on most websites they will not.
So, who wins, are books better or web pages? As much as I write on the web, I am still more likely to trust the info in a book.
