I don't know. I have a suspicion books are overvalued due to the cultual weight they've historically carried. Wise people read books. We tend to think of browsing the internet as frivilous when compared to reading classic literature -- but is it really? With books, the individual ideas don't get filtered by up and down votes or what have you. You only get ideas from one person -- you don't get immediate dissenting views. People on the internet know attention is a scarce resource and make an effort to condense their ideas as much as possible. Long form has advantages, certainly; but perhaps a big reason we are so drawn to the internet is that it is actually the better use of time.
With books, the individual ideas get filtered by the process of revision that's necessary to produce a work good enough to get past the slushpile.
It's a very different sort of filtering process. Social news sites distribute the filtering load across many different people, but collapse it in time - any given person spends about 2 seconds deciding whether to up- or down-vote a story. The publishing industry collapses the filtering load across very few people (a handful of editors decide whether a book will be accepted or rejected for publication), but spreads it out over time (your editor will then work with you over a protracted period to make sure the work expresses your views as clearly and as fully as possible).
They seem to result in very different outcomes. Social news tends to promote articles that are just barely at the edge of common practice. They make you think "Oh, that's a good idea", but can't fundamentally challenge the way you think, because you don't have time to absorb a fundamentally challenging idea.
Books, however, can fundamentally change your outlook - if you let them. But the process of letting them is difficult, and you need to find the right book, and it needs to come at the right time in your cognitive development.
I think the Internet has done a great thing for making the masses of people better informed, but it still does not replace books. Partially because, on a competitive level, all of your competitors have read the same blogs as well. You need to distinguish yourself with something difficult, which ideally would come from personal experience, but books are often the next best thing.
Reading books isn't just about consuming a simple, distilled idea in a short time. I'm working my way through a biography on Churchill in WWII, trying to understand the background for the role he plays in the English society into which I've recently relocated, and also because I'm very politically interested, and he's one of the big heroes of the movement I associate with.
This process (and lord knows it's a process, the book has been on my bed stand for months) has given lots of time to reflect on the person and his time, it has prompted inquiries and discussions with people better acquainted with him, the time and Britain. On a recent visit to the Imperial War Museum in London, I was able to draw on my readings, while the experience conversely expanded my horizons and my gains from reading the book.
Had this been a ten paragraph blog post, I would have gotten a re-iteration of the view that he's a hero, a central figure in post-war Britain, and particular in post-war conservatism. A comment on that blog post would probably point out the usual criticism, that the bombing of Dresden was an atrocity, that he was an unrelenting imperialist and that WWII was won by the Sovjets and the west just swooped in at the last minute to collect the prizes.
Well, I knew that. I just didn't understand it and it's implications. I still don't (and still have a few hundred pages to go), but I have a much better framework for exploring the issue.
One thing that good books can do, that I've never seen even the best blogposts do in a lasting way: they get under your skin and stay there. I read Microserfs several times in my mid- to late teens, and I'm certain the "Yes! This!" experience I got from this book forever shaped me towards entrepreneurship. I haven't read it for a decade, but the picture of sitting in someones garage passionately working on your own product is still my ideal of life.
A good handful of books have gotten under my skin in various ways, in ways that reading stuff online never did. There are many, many forgettable books, but the prize of that under-the-skin experience is enough that I keep trying. Even lacking that, getting sucked into an alternative reality is excellent entertainment.
Finally, I simply enjoy reading a book (or on my Kindle). I enjoy not having the distractions of a computer nearby.
If you read outside your own area you are in fact doing something different. You are combining knowledge from other fields and tie them into your own. This can never be a bad thing no matter how different the field might be.
