Another great thing about books is that they have a built in order to them. Start at page 1 and read the pages in order until the end. You can skip around, and they provide some aid for that via the table of contents and the index and references in the text to other parts of the text, but they (usually) are designed so that if you just start at the beginning and read through to the end you get everything the book has to offer in an order that makes sense.
Compare to far too much online documentation. This is what I've frequently run into. I want to learn about some particular subject, so I find a site that has an introduction or tutorial on that. The document is even book-like in the sense that it is organized as pages, and at the bottom of each page there are "next" and "previous" links.
But there is a sidebar on each page, with lists of related material and some of that sounds like material I'm going to need to know at some point. But there is no indication if it is material that I'm going to come across later if I just keep following the "next" links or it is something beyond the scope of the current document that I'll need to bookmark now to come back to later.