I tend to agree with both sides of this. I would agree that you can find a massive amount of Electronics information on the net via google and other search engines, but I also agree with Steve in as much as the best (and most to be relied on) information is found within proper documents which you must pay for.
As an example, I've taken some interest in programming the motorola 68000 series of CPUs. Now, if I type some relevant information into google I get a search result which returns a mass of useful information relating to the 68000, it's architecture, programming techinques and interfacing techniques. However, despite all this highly relevant and highly useful information available to me on the internet, I've failed to find one freely available document which ties together all of these aspects of 68000 programming. A lot of the information is there to be found, but it's largely scattered amoungst different documents on different websites on different servers across the globe.
I've recently purchased a hard-back book which can only be described as THE bible for 68000-series CPU information. It was quite expensive (about £30) but the information contained within it is extensive. The book starts at the beginning assuming little prior knowledge of assembly programming and leads the reader all the way through to in-depth knowledge of the CPUs architecture and complex programming techniques.
So in short, although a mass of information is available on the web, it's not always tied together neatly. Infact it's more than often dispersed across tens of different webpages and even if you take the time to fetch all the relevant information, because they are each different documents there's not a proper flow from one subject line to another. Also, the information fetched from websites on the internet is a mixture of documents published by professional engineers and documents published by hobbyists or amateurs interested in the subject. It's not always clear what sort of experience the author of the documents has and as such, you're not always able to completely trust the information 100%.
Personally I use the internet for "information fetching" quite a lot, but usually it's in addition to other resources or knowledge that I already have. For a reliable source of information I still very much prefer to purchase proper books or documents.
Brian