Re: Don't Blame Amazon its all down to google.
No a major part of the problem is the rate of churn and change in IT, which greatly limits the shelf life of traditional technical books in some subject areas:
For example:
Churn: books focused on specific products such as Office 2007 only really have a market whilst those products are in the market.
Change: I suggest the state-of-the-art of virtualisation and cloud has greatly changed since 2007 (when "Virtual Machines Companion" was published) and hence the relevance of the contents of these is similarly limited.
These effectively force us to use the internet to obtain current information (ie. google stuff) and also use it to rapidly (and cheaply) disseminate current information. However there are few (free) resources on the internet that will enable you to readily structure your learning so that you can get full coverage of a new subject.