It is not just about the numbers. There are more books produced than ever.
For me, it is the ease of finding the "best" on a certain topic (by rating...). This is because books are more "centralized" (Amazon, goodreads...) and identifiable (isbn). Web Articles, on the contrary, are more often like an ever receding stream: blogs, monthly magazines, Hacker news feed...
Concerning centralization, I wish sites like longreads [1] and Lindy Hacker News [2] were more popular, wide-ranging and organized (tags, ratings...)
And with respect to identification, I wish there was the equivalent of DOI for web articles : You can easily find that influential scholarly paper from the 60s, but you may never recover that brilliant magazine article from the 2000s (and search is getting worse)
For me, it is the ease of finding the "best" on a certain topic (by rating...). This is because books are more "centralized" (Amazon, goodreads...) and identifiable (isbn). Web Articles, on the contrary, are more often like an ever receding stream: blogs, monthly magazines, Hacker news feed...
Concerning centralization, I wish sites like longreads [1] and Lindy Hacker News [2] were more popular, wide-ranging and organized (tags, ratings...)
And with respect to identification, I wish there was the equivalent of DOI for web articles : You can easily find that influential scholarly paper from the 60s, but you may never recover that brilliant magazine article from the 2000s (and search is getting worse)
[1] https://longreads.com/
[2] https://hn.lindylearn.io/