As I am sipping wine from my last glass before calling it a day, I am staring absentmindedly at the last edition of my Residua. Published twelve years ago, it is quite a sight. The hard covers measure thirteen by eighteen centimeters. Lying on the table, the book is nine centimeters high. It boasts no less than one-thousand and two-hundred seventy-seven pages. By and by, its beauty overcomes me. What a handsome tome! And yet, I am starting to think at last, it contains just about a quarter of the number of words that can be found on my Residua website at this very moment. Without the World Wide Web, four such unwieldy volumes would stand in its place. And they would be rather difficult to navigate. Finding all the related pages would take days or maybe even weeks. Reading it from cover to cover would quickly turn into a chore, if not a nightmare. By the time I take the last sip of wine and get up from my chair, I am firmly convinced that the new technology is on my side. Books are things of the past. If only the last edition of my Residua were a bit less handsome!

Addendum (November 26, 2016)

A bit more than eight years later, the handsome volume of my Residua published in 1996 contains about fourteen percent of the number of words that can be found on my Residua website at present. Without the World Wide Web, seven such unwieldy volumes would stand in its place. Three volumes in eight years! Enough bragging, though. Returning to the main point of this piece, I am ever more firmly convinced that the new technology is on my side. Books are things of the past, indeed. As a growing number of selections from my magnum opus testify, any copying store is sufficient nowadays to print out a book of sorts. But the web is always there to make selections of choice. Anyone’s choice, that is.