Having grown up in a low-income, blue-collar background, I often think of the advantages I could have enjoyed during my childhood if the Web existed pre-1990s. I was information-starved and was turned off by the dreary, laborious nature of public libraries. It was all sooo slow. But I won’t fret too much. Thanks to the Internet, I’m getting to read anything I can dream of, and treasures I never even knew were buried. What an equalizer.

From “Net Wisdom,” a new Financial Times piece by Robert Cottrell, the editor of the great Browser blog:

“My first contention: this is a great time to be a reader. The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.

I don’t pretend that everything online is great writing. Let me go further: only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader, by which I mean the demographic that, in the mainstream media world, might look to the Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs or the Atlantic for information. Another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights.”