Electronic media has never been all that useful, as I’ve been telling reps since they began offering floppies. As noted in earlier comments, it’s hard to store, you can’t see what’s on a disk as you can with a 3-ring binder, manufacturers frequently required installation of a viewer, and in most cases, I don’t want to load up my hard drive with a lot of files that will be used only infrequently, and are already out of date.
Now that we have the Internet as a widely accessible virtual drive, there is little need for floppies, CDs, or DVDs. But we still need hardcopy, and will continue to need it for the foreseeable future. Each medium has unique advantages, and the combination of Internet and hardcopy has vastly improved the processes of product evaluation and writing specifications.
The Internet offers fast (never say instantaneous) access to text, pictures, animated demonstrations, on-line chat with technical support, and more. But, even though you can open multiple windows on a computer, comparing documents on the monitor is less than satisfactory, especially if you want to look at more than two things. It’s also impossible to easily flip back and forth between pages in a single book as you can do with hardcopy; I haven’t yet figured out how to stick my fingers between virtual pages.
Of course, if the manufacturers would either have good guide specs, or put the information we need in one location…