Growing Up in the Digital Age

I'm currently working on three seperate papers for three classes of mine. One on linguistic choices in general conference talks as a reflection of the times, another on the cowboy code-ism of Daisy Miller, and the third is a comparison of Stephen King's "Man in a Black Suit" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." Because I've grown up with the internet, most of my research has been conducted online and I'm reasonably proficient at looking stuff up on the internet. However for my Stephen King/Nathaniel Hawthorne paper, I've found that I needed to use a couple of books. I was just flipping through two of said books, scannning pages and chapter notes for any reference on King or Hawthorne. It was painful and tedious. I thought to myself: Why can't their be a "search" function on books? Why can't I tell the book "Show me every thing you have on Stephen King" and then it would tell me where to look? Five minutes later, I remembered that each book has an index, in which they tell me every page whereon they mention Stephen King or Nathaniel Hawthorne (and in some cases both of them together). It really would have been nice to remember that right at first.