Our reading efficiency is also increased through a by-product of information being digital; it is easy to set up and use software to search vast amounts of text. Consider that the texts of the entire Greek canon — all the books known to have survived from that ancient time — will fit neatly onto a couple of CD-ROMs, and can be searched in a matter of milliseconds. In the past, this would only have been possible through the laborious use of concordances (lists of word occurrences) if they existed, or through an exhaustive knowledge of the texts themselves.

We can also ask questions about such texts like “how many times does author A use word W”, without spending years of effort compiling the information. In scholarly circles today, this is sometimes mistaken for “knowledge” of the text---we are merely extracting information which we must interpret and criticise to form knowledge in a valid and sensible way. This textual analysis of text, whether used to ascertain the author of a dubious text, to analyse particular author's use of language, or to examine grammar and word use generally, must be used carefully and precisely with appropriate statistical techniques before it can yield real knowledge about a text (Hockey 2000.

Some are asking whether this type of analysis is an effective replacement for the experienced reader, who in some way “knows” the text intimately through reading and rereading. There are many questions that cannot easily be answered by merely searching for particular words, and grammatical features such as allusion, euphemism and irony are notably difficult to analyse.

There are also projects to create universal encyclopedias online, collating knowledge and linking it together in a much more flexible and searchable way than the traditional book-based encylopedias. One such is the Wikipedia, a user-contributed wealth of hyperlinked knowledge.

This also leads us to the question of whether the web become a replacement for our memories. Search tools such as Google have become both ubiquitous and all-encompassing, so that almost any question we need to answer is just a search query away. Will this mean that our minds will evolve to use this new tool rather than internal memory?