Another major advantage of books is structure. Well written books tend to follow a high level framework or narrative which makes it a lot easier to remember large quantities of information. I can recall significant amounts of what I read in Building the Perfect PC, and it gives me a great framework for buying components. But before I read that book I spent many more hours reading about which computers to buy online, and I recall very little from that research.
This is especially true with consumer gaming hardware blogs (apart from the obvious good ones like tom's hardware etc).
There is so much stuff written by COD/WoW obsessed teenagers that basically just regurgitates marketing points along with weird theories about how things actually work.
Luckily a rudimentary CS education does help sort the wheat from the chaff here.
