From 2007:
I read The Yale Book of Quotations from cover to cover. “Yeah, right,” my Wall Street Journal editor said when he ran across that claim in the first draft of my column, to which I replied firmly that I’d turned every damn page. Granted, I was sick as a dog that week and didn’t feel up to reading anything that required consecutive thought, but the fact remains that I did it, and in the process made any number of serendipitous discoveries, including the one about Mencken, that I almost certainly wouldn’t have made had I been “reading” The Yale Book of Quotations on a CD-ROM.
Therein lies the one great advantage of old-fashioned books: they lend themselves to browsing in a way that computerized databases do not….
Read the whole thing here.