Digital History

I am having second thoughts.  I am still interested in learning about the discoveries and inventions of the 21st century and relating them to those of the past two centuries.  But I am afraid it may require spending many hours sitting in front of the computer.  And I already exceed the healthy limit of  using a computer. 
History as I know it, written in books and shelved in libraries, doesn't exist any more.  In my local library, which has a large collection of books covering many areas of science and technology, I could only find two books relevant to the invention I wanted to write about, the World Wide Web, one of which was written for kids.

I dread googling.  I anticipate more than 100+ pages of information and no matter how much I narrow the search, I still will have many pages to go through to find authentic information.  A few years back I heard encyclopedia stopped publishing the hard copy of version of the book.  That's a pity!  I wonder if I can find what I am looking for in the digital version of encyclopedia, and I wonder if accessing this information is free of charge.  Wikipedia is another place.  Unfortunately, my list ends here.  I guess as I look for information I will develop a knack for searching for information in the 21st century.