Most people gather the professional information they need from the web by using search engines like Google. An interesting question that arises from that is: Do professional books die out? I think this will not happen in the next years, because most professionals who write a book do it because they are not willing to give you her knowledge for free and thus they don't share it in the net.
To be honest, I enjoy reading books much more than reading long publication on a monitor. But with books you don't have all the cool feature you as with web resources like bookmarking, sharing, tagging, commenting and so on. The first step towards this problem was done by Amazon when they introduced their recommendation system. This is helpful when you have found an interesting book and want to know what others think about it or what other people bought else. But often you don't know this people and you can't be sure if there opinion might be yours. Additionally I've often seen books at Amazon with multiple recommendations, ranging from 1 to 5 stars. So, what to do in that case?
Recently I came over the new Google book search, which has a nice feature called my library. Here you can add books you have read, label it with tags and stars and write reviews. I think this can help, because that way you can find out what books the people read you know and trust (if they use it). I started adding some of the best books I have read to my library.
