This is nice story but how is this any different than looking at wikipedia for a bit, reading and making notes on a kindle, etc. Your grandpa sounds like the type to use tools for personal enrichment so shouldn't the tools not matter?
These days most books have a copy online.
But it still tends to have large blind spots where the source is (a) pre-digital or (b) of interest to a relatively small total number of people.
Try heading to your local library or a used book store (Goodwill works in the US), find a technical or history book older than ~1980, then attempt to find the content in Wikipedia. Especially in history, the hit rate isn't good.
My private bookmarks won't get deleted by a zealous reviewer five minutes later.
It can be hard to contribute to Wikipedia without enmeshing yourself in the politics of it to protect your contributions from deletionists. This gets covered every few months on HN.
In the late 19th century there was a strong drive in academic history towards the idea of "total history": comprehensive accounts of everything that mattered from the beginning of recorded history to the current day. All these incredibly well educated German historians started outputting 20 volume world histories.
And no-one except a historiographical specialist would read them now.
They drank an ocean and pissed a cup.
Reading a book != reading Wikipedia != watching an educational film
Judging by most of the comments on this article I'd say that people feel like we've lost something in the latter two.
Initial polling was that students hated it from the get go. They wanted, needed textbooks. At the end of the first semester they did the polls again and, surprise, nobody wanted to go back to dead trees. Books are expensive and text search is amazing.
I loved being able to play ROMs during class, but the difference between looking at information on the screen and in a book? Not fundamentally different.
I'd say where digital information shines is in post-secondary education where you're beginning to perform self-directed research, for the reasons you mentioned. And some students have a modicum of self control by then... ;)