Agreed. I've payed out north of $100 several times for old print copies of books which simply aren't available in digital form (not even as sketchy scanned PDFs on piracy sites, trust me, I tried).
I mean, it's not exactly the most kosher thing to do (though you can usually get actual oficially released ebooks for the newer stuff), but you can usually get PDF versions of whatever textbook you want on the internet.
I know about a guy with a serious hoarding syndrome, who has hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff stashed somewhere.
I'm neutral on many of these points, except this one. This is simply not true. The Internet can be incredibly shallow on a very wide range of topics. I mean maybe if you have access to University Library systems etc...but I don't think that's the "Internet" you mean.
I hope this will get better, although the impetus to make the Internet deeper seems to have slacked off recently.