While creating a new WordPress site this week, I needed some additional textual material to help me get round a series of road blocks in the installation process. I went to the catalog at my library, and searched for some time in the e-book version of WordPress for Dummies. I confess that I was in a hurry, and trying to do what was in effect, a serendipitous search. Not for the first time, I found that I had to read far more text than I wanted to, in order to get to the core of what I needed. The title was only available as an e-book at the library, so instead I went out and bought a print version of the same text. Because the ...For Dummies format is so sparse and heading-orientated, I was able to find the sections of text I needed very quickly.
Electronic books do not have all the same attributes as their print cousins. The e-book can do things well that the print can not do, and vice versa. In e-books, one of the most useful attributes, is to be able to do single word/phrase searching within texts. This task is virtually impossible in a print text, even with the help of a good index. However, for the job I needed it for this week, there was simply no substitute for flipping quickly through large numbers of printed pages!
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