> I'd be hard-pressed to find such an accurate and comprehensive reference on that topic anywhere on the internet

You can find The Art of Electronics on the internet... And you can put it on an old tablet with dozens of other reference books.

However, you can’t read it without electricity to charge the battery and an internet connection. The device you read it on distracts you with notifications, emails, and other communications. You cannot easily scribe notes in the margins or easily flip between two pages that have related information. The device you read it on costs $1000 and must be replaced by every few years due to operating system obsolescence. You cannot read the book in bright outside sunlight on the device. The site that you purchased the book from goes out of business or the link to the book is broken or the site is down preventing access to the book. You drop the device and it breaks, while dropping the book is typically not an issue.

$1000? Try $100 for an Android e-ink device. No notifications, WiFi is only on for 10 minutes from enabling to preserve battery life.

Furthermore, plenty of stores sell you files to consume however you want.

Oh and e-ink works fine in sunlight and lasts weeks without charging. And FYI, there's plenty of notetaking systems.

My partner and I have been using these e-ink devices for almost five years. Works fine. No replacement required thus far. It is a specialized version of Android.

> that a stack of paper had all the information you could possibly look on a given for in a concise, reliable manner

The World Book entry on enormous subjects of great importance was still maybe a few pages long. Today, a fair amount of primary source material in archives on different freaking continents is available online.

Printed documentation for hardware and software was frequently not exhaustive and there was no way of asking for help quickly. Maybe you had a help line. Maybe you knew hobbyists in a local meetup group. But that old DOS manual wasn't anywhere near as useful as what is available today.

Art of Electronics is the EE Bible, has been updated a couple of times everything is googleable now though that I generally get the answer quicker that way, same as my ide, pressing F1 generally gives me the answer but google also does it and in the context of the problem I am having so that is definitely a +1 for newer technology.