and stored on a shelf with others of its kind, as has been done for 500 years? Or is a book the ideas contained within, regardless of their format? Can you stack them up and put them in a CD rack? Can you put them on a tiny little credit card, insert the card in a portable computer and read them on a screen? Can you add music and video? "We only invest in the creation of one product here, the book," said Jack Romanos, the president of the consumer group at Simon & Schuster. "But the book's gone in five different directions."

What matters is content, Mr. Romanos said, something publishers have in spades. The question is how to put it to use. "In the past, you said, 'What sort of book, how many pages, what's the trim size, what's the market?'" said Nancy Dickinson, the director of advanced media at HarperCollins. "Now you say, 'How would this idea work if I could see video or hear sound? How would this make it more accessible and a richer experience for the customer?'"

For traditional publishers, so steeped in old habits that many editors still regularly edit manuscripts on paper (even when the author turns in a version on disk), evolving into something different looks to be a bumpy and confusing proposition. Though Ms. Dickinson's department has counterparts at every big book publisher in New York, new media divisions tend to consist of a small band of computer literates preaching to the company's uninitiated, resistant masses. Publishers are stubbornly holding on to electronic rights in case their books go electronic, and most large companies have already produced half a dozen or so general interest multimedia titles on CD-ROM or floppy disk. But they're not sure what the future will require.

One thing that does seem clear is that in the lucrative academic and reference markets, new media are quickly overtaking traditional books, and for good reason. Consider the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The complete set costs more than $1,500, weighs 118 pounds and takes up more than four feet of shelf space. A commensurate encyclopedia on CD-ROM—Microsoft's Encarta, for instance—costs $99.99, holds up to 650 megabytes of data, weighs under an ounce, and could fit in your purse. And it's rich with extras. Look up Beethoven, for instance, and the text of the regular entry appears on your screen. Click your mouse and you can listen to a 30-second snippet from the Ninth Symphony. Click again and you can learn how Wagner was influenced by Beethoven, and hear the results. Look up Edvard Munch, click your mouse and see a high-resolution version of The Scream appear on your screen.

It's the same with dictionaries. Looking up a word in, say, the Oxford English Dictionary requires hauling an unwieldy volume down from a shelf and then hauling another volume down, too, if the first definition piqued your interest in a new word somewhere else. For the condensed version of the dictionary, the only one most people can afford, you need a magnifying glass to read the type. But all the volumes can fit on a single CD-ROM, which can store up to 300,000 pages of text and do cross-referencing in a flash.

Donald Norman, who founded the department of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, and who now holds Apple Computer's highest research position, said: "Within 10 years, dictionaries will essentially all be electronic. They will win because they offer ease of access and readability."

Books on floppy disk are useful for quick cross-referencing. And with its video and audio components, the CD-ROM also lends itself naturally to other reference works, books that teach you, for instance, how to adjust the brakes on your Trans Am, install a shelf in the basement, learn American Sign Language, plant a rosebush, truss a chicken, or search through thousands of choices to find a film to rent on Sunday night. Companies like Byron Preiss Multimedia, which began as a conventional book packager, are beginning to take traditional titles and make them reference works. A forthcoming CD-ROM based on John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath allows readers to see photographs that inspired Steinbeck, a map of the Joad family's route through Oklahoma and video interviews with people in Steinbeck's life. Somewhere in there lurks the novel's text, which seems almost beside the point next to the souped-up new features. But Byron Preiss himself insists that The Grapes of Wrath on CD-ROM will never supplant The Grapes of Wrath, the book. "It doesn't replace the experience of sitting in bed reading," he said. "It coexists, and it amplifies the book."

Electronic publishing is making a serious impact in children's books. "What is clear is that children are much more comfortable with technology," said Randi Benton, who recently set up Random House's new media division. The company recently embarked on a joint venture with Broderbund Software, an interactive children's software company, to start Living Books, which provide lively sounds, elaborate graphics and hundreds of things to play with in such stories as Aesop's fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" and Mercer Mayer's Just Grandma and Me. Such books—which have sold tens of thousands of copies already—are somewhere between computer games and hypertext fiction, a new computer-based format that turns traditional beginning-to-end narrative on its head by affording the reader the thoroughly post-modern opportunity to skip from place to place in the text, creating his own story and arriving at his own ending.

"I think the idea that this next generation is going to start at page 1 and go to page 284 and then close the book is wrong," said the president of Warner Books, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, who recently discovered the joys of an on-line world when he got himself hooked up to the Internet. "This is a generation that has been raised on MTV and a multitude of stimuli. They don't think linearly; they think mosaically. And they're much more used to getting their information from talking and listening than from reading books."

It's easy to be seduced by the new products, but part of the trick for publishers these days is to avoid investing too much in technology that might burn out as completely as LP records. Richard Sarnoff, who heads the new media group of Bantam Doubleday Dell, said, "We have to decide what is likely to augment, and what is likely to cannibalize, our business." Big publishers have several ways to go. They can buy their own software companies. They can form copublishing partnerships, as Putnam did when it made a deal with Sony to publish H. R. Haldeman's diaries, Putnam in hard cover and Sony on CD-ROM. They can embark on joint ventures or buy stakes in multimedia companies.

But mixing multimedia publishers with traditional book publishers seems counterintuitive, like mixing milk with grapefruit juice. They speak different languages. They look at their products, and at the world, in different ways. Even the word "product," applied to books, would seem anathema to editors of the old school. This spring Jason Epstein, the editorial director of Random House's adult trade group, ventured into the offices of Voyager, a Manhattan software company, one morning to talk to his former assistant, 26-year-old Maryam Mohit. Ms. Mohit, one of a flotilla of young editors who have left traditional publishing houses to join new media companies, showed him one of her latest works, the CD-ROM version of Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind. Mr. Epstein looked at the video of a tiny Marvin Minsky gesticulating at a lectern, listened to Mr. Minsky's speech on the speakers, and then spotted a turgid sentence on the screen, where the text was printed out. That's what he focused on. "I would have edited that," he said.

"The mentality of a CD-ROM publisher is different from that of a book publisher," said Michael Lynton, until recently the senior vice president for publishing at the Walt Disney Company, whose publishing arm, Hyperion Books, is investing in new media projects. "People go into book publishing and bookselling because they want to be involved with words and books. They don't want to make money. If they do, they've made a serious mistake. The CD-ROM people, and the gaming community—those people are in love with games, in love with computers and in love with making money. They have no problem talking about units."

Many publishing houses suffer from a generational divide in which their staffs can be split in two: the ones who grew up with computers and the ones who didn't. Traditional editors read The New York Review of Books, not Wired magazine; many even still use their old manual typewriters, edit by pencil, and feel unnerved by, even afraid of, computers.

At Penguin U.S.A., many editors are being gingerly exposed to new media by a 28-year-old vice president, Julie Hansen, who administers a lab where employees can drop in and play with a CD-ROM unit for the first time.

Voyager, which recently abandoned its headquarters in southern California for an enormous converted loft in Soho, has the atmosphere of a computer company: large open spaces broken up by partitions, chicly casual workers without official titles, a buzz of new ideas. In an interview about the future of books, the president, Bob Stein, was wearing a pair of baggy trousers and a T-shirt reading "Free All Political Prisoners." "Will books exist? I think that's the wrong question," Mr. Stein said. "Humans have tremendous capacity to find imaginative uses for old media, and books will be with us for generations. But the locus of important intellectual communication is going to shift away from books. The complexity of palate that authors have with these new media is going to draw them in."

Mr. Stein envisions a creative brain drain that will pull authors toward the new media. "One hundred years ago, if you were going to write stories the only choice would be plays or novels," he said. "Now, you're already thinking about the movies. And with CD-ROM's, you can create the intimate experience of a novel and the experience of video, audio and film."

Art Spiegelman is one author who has now worked in both media. Voyager recently put out the CD-ROM version of Maus, his critically acclaimed comic-book depiction of the Holocaust. It includes audio interviews with his father, who figured prominently in Maus; aerial photographs of concentration camps, and dozens of early sketches Mr. Spiegelman made when he put Maus together. "The least interesting thing about the ROM is the book itself, because it was conceived as a book," Mr. Spiegelman said. "But I don't see it as competitive with a book, any more than going to the theater is competitive or watching television is competitive. On some vague level it's a plea for attention, but the experience is a different one."

The new formats are likely to have a great effect on the production and distribution of books. For one thing, making a CD-ROM costs about 68 cents and can be done virtually instantaneously, while making a book costs between $2 and $3.50. For another, CD-ROM's are sold mostly in software stores, not traditional bookstores. They come in big, clunky boxes shrouded in glossy packaging, and they're arranged according to which machines they're compatible with—not according to subject. They're impossible to browse through, in the manner of a book, unless the store sets up a computer demonstration area. "The traditional bookstore is an extraordinary resource for the publisher because you get people on the staff who have a lot of product knowledge and can be incredibly helpful to the customer," Dan McNamee, a partner in a business called the Publishing and Media Group, said. "But they tend to be very uncomfortable with electronic products. On the other hand, software distributors are not used to providing support for highly varied product lines. And they can talk about technology, but they're not used to talking about content."

But some people envision a time when bookstores themselves might be obsolete. Why would you need to walk into a store, they say, when books come on little disks for your personal computer, or when they're made more widely available through places like the On-Line Bookstore, which is based in Massachusetts and sells books through the Internet? Although bookstore executives like Steve Riggio, the executive vice president of Barnes & Noble, say they envision their stores metamorphosing into information superstores, it's unclear how this will happen.

Despite the obvious advantages of electronic books, visions of a future world confined indoors—working, playing, communicating, reading and shopping via computer—have so far vastly outpaced the realities, particularly when it comes to books. Tens of millions of people have the capacity to read books on floppy disk, but they don't.

And at this point, according to industry figures, only about 5 million households have CD-ROM attachments on their computers. The number is expected to increase to more than 10 million by the end of the year; new models of old computers are sold almost exclusively now with CD-ROM attachments. But it will take a long time before everyone has the equipment.

Meanwhile, computer companies are scrambling to come up with a technology that mimics a book completely, that can put text on a screen as effectively as on paper, but none have succeeded yet. Devices like the Powerbook and the Sony Bookman still don't come close to matching the experience of reading a paper-and-print book while curled up in a chair, in bed, on the train, under a tree, in an airplane. "The machines have to be a lot better," said Jack Hoeft, the chief executive of Bantam Doubleday Dell. "As the technology improves, I expect that they will be, and then people who want to read a book on a computer reader can do it that way."

But probably they won't want to. Olafur Olafsson, the 32-year-old president of Sony Electronic Publishing, who also happens to be the best-selling novelist of all time in his native Iceland, says, "Novels on a computer screen don't do the job." Sitting in his upper-floor office with a picture-window view of Central Park, he plucked the Alfred A. Knopf translation of his latest novel, Absolution, from his desk. Under no circumstances, he said, would he want to read it on a computer screen. "Maybe if you had something of this dimension and this weight and as easy to hold as this book," he said. "The screen would have to be easy to read, it wouldn't be able to suffer from heat and glare, and you could easily go back and forth from page to page. But I don't see that technology arriving any time soon." And after all, the modern book is the result of centuries of trial and error during which people wrote on bark, on parchment, on vellum, on clay, on scrolls, on stone, chiseling characters into surfaces or copying them out by hand.

"The book has been with us for about 500 years," said Donald Norman of Apple Computer, who recently published a book, Things That Make Us Smart, which argues that technology sometimes runs away with itself, dazzling and tyrannizing people instead of serving them by making life simpler. "People think it's unsophisticated technologically, but the book has evolved into an extremely convenient and sophisticated artifact. It uses modern paper, with good contrast and good quality print. The typefaces themselves have evolved over many years, the design and layout have evolved in esthetic quality and utility. And in many ways, the book is a good random access device that's extremely easy to scan through."

The novelist Nicholson Baker said: "We've come up with a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens. If the end of civilization comes and we lose electricity, we can hold a CD-ROM up to the light and it has totemic value, but we have no past."

There's more to it than that. In an instant culture, books represent our more ruminative, deliberate and thoughtful side. Earlier this year Bill Henderson, the editor of the Pushcart Press in Wainscott, L.I., founded a group called the Lead Pencil Club. The idea came to him when he was reading Doris Grumbach's memoir Extra Innings, which describes her grumpy ill will toward all her electronic gadgets. The club is devoted to the superiority of non-technology. Its motto is "Not So Fast," and the book is one of its favorite devices.

"America's the only country that doesn't have a past," Mr. Henderson said. "We've become speed freaks, and things like faxes and E-mail contribute to our national amnesia. Books don't allow that to happen. You go to the library and you see the past out there and you can browse at leisure. And a book is personal—you can hold it in your hand, turn down its pages, write in the margins, carry it to the beach. It's a cliché, but you can. I don't think we're going to put up with the demise of the book."

And if Mr. Gates at Microsoft likes computers so much, you might ask, why did he decide to publish his forthcoming book the regular way? "The medium is appropriate," said Jonathan Lazarus, the vice president of systems strategy at Microsoft, who negotiated Mr. Gates's book project—for $2.5 million—with Penguin U.S.A. "There's a certain test of one's credibility and ideas when you have to put them in 300 pages of prose. We've grown up in a society where we learn a lot from books and where books are a well-understood way to get information. If I said to you, 'I'd like you to learn all about fly fishing,' you wouldn't be surprised if I said, 'Here's a book about fly fishing to read.'"

As Mr. Norman, whose book about the tyrannies of technology is about to come out in a new CD-ROM version, said, "If you really want to read my book, I'd recommend the paper version."

D. T. Max (essay date September 1994)

SOURCE: "The End of the Book?" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 274, No. 3, September, 1994, pp. 61-2, 64, 67-8, 70-1.

[In the essay below, Max compares books with CD-Roms and speculates on the future of both.]

An office-party atmosphere pervaded the headquarters of Wired magazine, the newly created oracle of the computer-literate generation. Wired is housed on the third floor of a flat, low brick building with plain-pine interiors in an industrial section of San Francisco south of Market Street. The area is known as Multimedia Gulch, for the scores of small companies working in the neighborhood which mix sound, video, and text into experimental interactive multimedia computer products that they hope will one day sell millions of copies. Wired is not an ordinary computer magazine: it promises the faithful reader not mere computing power—something available from a grown-up computer magazine like Macworld, which happens to be across the street—but, more important, hipness, the same sense of being ahead of the curve that once attached to a new Bob Dylan album or Richard Brautigan book.

The weekday afternoon I was there, hero sandwiches lay on the table, the magazine's pet gray parrot was hanging outside its cage, and young men and women with sophisticated eyewear sat rapt before their computer screens. The reference folders and lay-out paraphernalia common to magazine editorial departments were scattered around. The ringing of the phones was constant. When I had first called Wired's co-founder, Louis Rossetto, in the summer of 1993, I got through to him immediately, and he had, if anything, too much time to speculate about the shape of things to come. Several months later I had to go through a secretary and a publicist for my interview, and once I arrived, I was made to wait while more-urgent calls were put through. What happened in the interim is that the information highway became a hot subject. Rossetto was now every media journalist's and Hollywood agent's first call.

What I wanted from Louis Rossetto was his opinion on whether the rise of the computer culture that his magazine covered would end with the elimination by CD-ROMS and networked computer databases of the hardcover, the paperback, and the world of libraries and literate culture that had grown up alongside them. Was print on its way out? And if it was, what would happen to the publishers who had for generations put out books, and to the writers who had written them? Or was there something special about the book that would ensure that no technical innovation could ever supplant it? Would the book resist the CD-ROM and the Internet just as it has resisted radio, television, and the movies?

Finally I was taken into the sunlit confines of his office. Bookshelves ran along one wall. A forty-five-year-old career journalist with shoulder-grazing gray hair, Rossetto is a late convert to computers. He spent much of the 1980s in Europe, and gives off a mild sense of disengagement—there is a touch of the sixties about him, as there is about much else in the Gulch. Now he set out his vision of a fast-changing computerized, paperless, nearly book-free society, and did so with a certainty that would frighten even someone whose sense of equilibrium, unlike mine, did not involve visits to bookstores or the belief that last year's laptop is basically good enough. "The changes going on in the world now are literally a revolution in progress, a revolution that makes political revolution seem like a game," Rossetto, who recently sold a minority interest in his magazine to Condé Nast, said.

It will revolutionize how people work, how they communicate, and how they entertain themselves, and it is the biggest engine for change in our world today. We're looking at the end of a twenty- or thirty- or forty-year process, from the invention of tubes to transistors to fiber-optic and cable to the development of cable networks, until we've reached critical mass today.

I asked if there was no downside, no tradeoff for all that information in the world that was to come. "It doesn't keep me up at night, I admit," he said.

Written information is a relatively new phenomenon. Depositing it and being able to reference it centuries later is not common human experience. In some ways what is happening with online is a return to our earlier oral tradition. In other ways, it is utterly new, a direct connection of minds. Humans have always been isolated, and now we're starting to see electronic connections generating an intellectual organism of their own, literally a quantum leap beyond our experience with consciousness.

This is classic 1990s cybervisionarism, repeated up and down the halls of Wired and echoed throughout the Bay area, and it derives directly from the teenage-male personalities of the hackers who created the computer industry: cyberspace will be like a better kind of school.

There are three principal articles of faith behind this vision. 1) The classroom will be huge: the linking of information worldwide will cause a democratic explosion in the accessibility of knowledge. 2) The classroom will be messy: the sense of information as an orderly and retrievable quantity will decline, and you won't necessarily be able to find what you're looking for in cyberspace at any given time. 3) There will be no teachers: the "controllers of information"—censors, editors, and studio executives—will disappear, and the gates of public discourse will swing open before everyone who can get on-line. Anyone can publish; anyone can read what is published; anyone can comment on what he or she has read. Rossetto had been delineating his vision for twenty minutes, but suddenly it was time to go. An assistant popped in to pull him into an editorial meeting. "I have a pretty cynical view of most of the American media," Rossetto said before leaving (read: "You'll get this wrong. You'll be hostile"). "Their jobs are at stake, because their businesses are threatened. Take Time magazine. What function would it have in the modern world?"

One look at Wired suggests a gap between message and messenger. Wired looks more radical than it is. It cheerleads and debunks its subjects using editorial formulas that came in with the nineteenth-century magazine—a fictional takeoff on Microsoft, written by Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X; a classic star cover on Laurie Anderson, "America's multimediatrix"—rather than harnessing any global back-and-forth among literate minds. Although Wired communicates extensively by E-mail with its readers, conducts forums, and makes back issues available on-line, its much-repeated goal of creating a magazine—currently called HotWired—that is especially designed to exist electronically remains fuzzy. For the moment this is no open democracy, and Wired is no computer screen—its bright graphics would make a fashion magazine envious. Wired celebrates what doesn't yet exist by exploiting a format that does: it's as if a scribe copied out a manuscript extolling the beauty that would one day be print.

Overhyped or not, interactive multimedia do hold vast potential for the companies that in the next decades back the right products in the right formats. Multimedia are not new—a child's pop-up book is one example, and an illustrated pre-Gutenberg Bible is another. But interactive multimedia as envisioned by the computer industry (especially if television cables or telephone wires are reconfigured to accommodate two-way high-quality video digital transmissions—technologies that may be in place on a national scale sometime around the millennium) have great potential, because they would persuade consumers to bring software into their homes as they brought it into their offices in the 1980s. Who wouldn't want a screen that accessed all currently existing forms of information, from mail to movies, and did so with great convenience and flexibility?

Even if this vision is only partly realized, the book, the newspaper, and the video will be hard-pressed to maintain their place in our culture. Look at the book without sentiment and its limitations are evident: books can excite the imagination, but they can't literally make you see and hear. "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" Lewis Carroll's Alice grouses, before tumbling down the rabbit hole into the more absorbing precincts of Wonderland, in one of the favorite texts of hackers. Interactive-multimedia designers, with their brew of sights, sounds, and words, believe that they could keep Alice (her age puts her very much in their target group) above-ground and interested. Or a multimedia designer could expand the book's plot line, giving the reader the choice of whether Alice goes down the hole or decides to stick around and read alongside her sister on the river-bank. The reader could hear Alice's voice, or ask her questions about herself, the answers to which are only implicit in the book.

When something intrigues the readers of a printed book, they have to wrestle with an index and then, perhaps, go to a library to find out more about the subject; they can't just hit a search button to log on to a database attached to the book and read something else on the same subject, as they can on a computer. "I decided books were obsolete thirty-four years ago," says Ted Nelson, an early computer hacker who coined the word "hypertext" in the early sixties to describe how knowledge would be accessed if all information were available simultaneously. "I have thousands of books and I love them. It's only intertwining I want more of."

But such intertwining—a vast linkage of electronic text across databases worldwide—would inevitably push the printed word to the margins and replace it with sleeker, more efficient text conveyers. It is not the viability of text itself that is in question. On the contrary, whether paper gives way to the computer screen or not, there is little question that words as the cornerstone of communication are safe. "Littera scripta manet," an anonymous Roman wrote; "The written word endures." This is a comforting quotation—typically if erroneously attributed to the poet Horace—that writers about multimedia are fond of using. In fact, words are multiplying wildly. In the world of computers they are a bargain compared with images: cheap to transport and easy to store. Probably more words are put out in a week by the 20 million people who use the loosely strung computer networks that constitute the Internet than are published by all major American publishing companies in a year. There's a "Poetry Corner" and bulletin boards where new novels get posted constantly. In a recent announcement a nonprofit organization called Project Gutenberg, run out of a university in Illinois, presented as its mysteriously precise goal "To Give Away One Trillion E[lectronic] Text Files [of classic books] by December 21, 2001." When I mentioned the scope of fiction on the Internet to the novelist John Updike, he said lightly, "I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway." And of course he is right. But his is a minority opinion outside the circles of tastemakers.

Text and books are not, however, joined at the hip—words don't need print. "Books on paper are a medium unto themselves," Louis Rossetto says, "and my sense is that anything that is stand-alone is a dead end." But even to Rossetto a world completely without books seems unlikely. One view is that the book will become the equivalent of the horse after the invention of the automobile or the phonograph record after the arrival of the compact disc—a thing for eccentrics, hobbyists, and historians. It will not disappear, but it will become obsolete. Multimedia programmers themselves disagree sharply on whether this will come to pass in five years, ten years, or never. One question is whether there is money to be made in the production of multimedia. Another is how good multimedia products will ever be, for by industry admission they are not very good now. The great majority of the 3,000 multimedia products launched last year were little more than rudimentary efforts. "I think that there are fewer than thirty titles with good, solid, deep information out there," Rick Fischer, the director of product development at Sony Electronic Publishing, says. "The majority of titles are kind of pseudo-multimedia. People are still learning how to do this." Besides, computer companies are not as excited by books as they are by games, which represent an ever-increasing share of the market. Sony, for example, has backed an interactive game version of its movie Bram Stoker's Dracula—Harker races against rats, wolves, and flaming torches to slay the Prince of Darkness—rather than the book Dracula, 300 pages of print that could be augmented with perhaps a moving illustration or two.

Publishers are terrified. They have read a thousand times that one day we will play games, shop, watch movies, read books, and do research all on our computer or television screens. Computer companies are skillful at bluffing one another, forever claiming that they are nearly ready to release a hot new product, which is in truth barely in prototype. This kind of nonproduct has the nickname "vaporware" within the industry. But publishers, unfamiliar with computer culture, believe the hype. In the past year Publishers Weekly ran six major stories on how CD-ROM and the Internet will remake publishing. The comments of Laurence Kirshbaum, the president of Warner Books, a subsidiary of Time Warner, were not untypical: "I don't know if there's the smell of crisis in the air, but there should be. Publishers should be sleeping badly these days. They have to be prepared to compete with software giants like [Microsoft's chairman] Bill Gates." Publishers are most of all afraid of doing nothing—as hardback publishers did when they ignored the paperback explosion of the 1960s and 1970s. So they are rushing to form electronic-publishing divisions and to find partners in the software business. "Eighteen months ago no one was talking about multimedia and CD-ROMS seriously, and now everyone is deeply involved and deeply conscious of them," says Alberto Vitale, the chairman of the normally cautious Random House, Inc., which has signed a co-venture deal with Broderbund, a leading children's software developer in Novato, California, to create children's interactive multimedia. Putting Dr. Seuss on CD-ROM is one of their first efforts. The Palo Alto "media kitchen" owned by Viacom, where the company's film, television, and book divisions cooperate—at least theoretically—on interactive-multimedia research, is designing new travel guides: why actually go to San Francisco when by 1995 you will be able to take a virtual walking tour on a Frommer CD-ROM? Interest has even percolated into the last redoubt of traditional publishing, the firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Since its inception Knopf has placed great emphasis on the book as handsome object. But Knopf's president attended the first International Illustrated Book and New Media Publishing Market fair, held earlier this year, which was designated to introduce multimedia's various content providers to one another. (The fact that the fair was in Cannes probably did not hurt attendance.)

Behind the stampede into electronic publishing is doubtless a widespread feeling among those in conventional publishing that the industry is in dire, if ill-defined, trouble. A decade-long trend among major publishers toward publishing fewer trade books recently had an impact on four imprints in just two months, most notably a near-total cutback of Harcourt, Brace's trade department (the publishers of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Alice Walker) and the closing of Ticknor & Fields adult books, a Houghton Mifflin imprint (which included William Gass and Robert Stone among its authors). Aggressive marketing has allowed publishers to sell more copies of their top titles, creating the illusion of pink-cheeked health in some years. But after decades of competition from radio, television, movies, videos, and Americans' increasingly long workdays, it is hard to imagine how the publishers of mainstream fiction and nonfiction in book form will ever again publish as many titles as they did in the past; after all, popular fiction magazines never recovered from the advent of radio serials. Giants like Doubleday and Putnam publish perhaps a third as many hardcover books as they did ten years ago, and McGraw-Hill, once the publisher of Vladimir Nabokov and hundreds of other authors, is out of the new-trade-book business altogether. Recently Random House sent a glass-is-half-full letter to book-review editors, letting them know that the company would be making their jobs easier by publishing fewer books. According to a 1993 survey by Dataquest, a San Jose information-technology market-research firm, most employees in the multimedia-content industry come from traditional print backgrounds. And the extremely rudimentary employment statistics that exist for the publishing industry show a decline since the late 1980s in New York-based publishing jobs, though it is hardly enough of one to confirm a sea change in publishing's fortunes, or to suggest that Armageddon is around the corner. Last year nearly 50,000 new titles destined for bookstores were published, and total consumer-reference CD-ROM software sales amounted to only about three percent of trade-book sales.

Besides, the computer industry acknowledges that what most readers think of as books—that is, novels and nonfiction text—gain nothing from being on screen; the appeal of the product depends on the quality of the prose and the research, neither of which is enhanced by current screens. Whether you scroll down a screen or turn a page to read The Bridges of Madison County makes a great deal of difference in the quality of the reading experience. "I just don't personally believe in reading novels on a computer screen," says Olaf Olafsson, the president of Sony Electronic Publishing and the author of Absolution, a novel published in March by Pantheon Books. He says that he would never want to see his own work on a computer: "There's a lot of content that's now being delivered on paper that's fine on paper." The book has great advantages over the computer: it's light and it's cheap. That it has changed little in 400 years suggests an uncommonly apt design. John Updike says,

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values—the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

You can drop a book in the bathtub, dry it out on the radiator, and still read it. You can put it in the attic, pull it out 200 years later, and probably decipher the words. You can curl up in bed with it or get suntan lotion on it. These are definitely not possibilities suggested by the computer. A well-thumbed paperback copy of John Grisham blowing in a beach breeze represents a technological strong-hold the computer may never invade.

Lovers of literature (and schlock) may not see much change, then, but that doesn't mean publishers are in for an easy ride. Novels, nonfiction, and belles lettres are a prestige sideshow for publishers—they amount to only a few billion dollars in a roughly $18 billion book industry. Take dictionaries and encyclopedias, which are in effect databases in book form. The hand cannot match a computer chip in accessing given references, which constitutes the primary function of such works. Last year the 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the flagship publication of the 400-year-old university press, sold four times as many copies in a new CD-ROM version as in its traditional twenty-volume book form. The company has said that the next print edition, due in a decade, may well be the last. At an October, 1993, celebration at the New York Public Library in honor of the publication of the fifth edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia in both book form and (a year hence) on CD-ROM, one guest speaker commented that the next edition, whenever it was ready, might well not have a paper counterpart. There was barely an objection from the audience.

Publishers are divided over the fate of so-called "soft reference titles"—cookbooks and how-to books—and children's books. These are huge markets, and the question is whether electronic books will capture them or expand on them. "My generation may be the last … to have a strong visceral affection for books," Janet Wikler, a former director of advanced media at Harper Collins, told Publishers Weekly last year.

What publishers have not stopped to consider is whether consumers like CD-ROMS in the first place—or how comfortable they will ever be with networked, digitalized, downloaded books when they become available. It may be a question of technical proficiency: how many families possess the sophistication to use Microsoft's new CD-ROM Musical Instruments—a charming visual and audio tour of the instruments of the world which is perfect for six-year-olds? The product requires either a multimedia computer or "a Multimedia PC upgrade kit, which includes CD-ROM drive (with CD-DA outputs, sustained 150K/second transfer rate and a maximum seek time of 1 second while using no more than 40% of the CPU's processing power)." Electronic encyclopedias have all but driven print encyclopedias out of the market in large part because they are "bundled"—sold at a deep discount to computer-hardware manufacturers to be included free when the consumer buys a CD-ROM drive. This is roughly like giving the consumer a book if he will only buy a lamp. "Traditional publishers may be a Luddite elite, but software publishers are arrogant sheep," says Michael Mellin, a multimedia executive who until last year was the publisher of Random House's electronic-publishing division. "One thing publishers don't realize is that there hasn't been a comparable kick in sales of CD-ROM multimedia titles given the rise in the number of CD-ROM drives installed." In other words, books on CD-ROM don't sell—at least not yet. A study of the industry last year found that of those people who had bought a CD-ROM drive, fewer than half had returned to the computer store to buy new discs. Compare this with the way the compact-disc player caught on in the mid-1980s. Interactive multimedia may turn out to be the biggest bust since the paperless office. One former industry executive describes multimedia as "a solution in search of a problem, doing what other things do already, only slightly less well."

Publishers derive their impressions of the awesome potential of multimedia from products like Microsoft's much publicized Encarta CD-ROM, a magnificent encyclopedia with text drawn from Funk & Wagnall's twenty-nine-volume encyclopedia and augmented by hundreds of video and audio clips. Alice would have fun with this: she could listen to bird calls and African drums, or experiment with changing the moon's orbit. (She could also click on Bill Gates's name and hear his nasal assurance that Microsoft "has never wavered from the vision" of a personal computer "on every desk and in every home." This was not part of Funk & Wagnall's original text.) But having been five years in development, employing a hundred people at its peak, and reportedly costing Microsoft well upward of $5 million, Encarta may be something of a Potemkin Village, meant for credulous competitors to marvel at. The company has dropped the price from $395 to $139 to try to get consumers to buy it.

Paper has limitations, but the computer may have more. As a physical object, it is hardly comforting. "Who'd want to go to bed with a Powerbook?" John Baker, a vice-president at Broderbund, asks. And even if the laptop goes on shrinking, its screen, whose components represent nearly all the machine's cost, remains at best a chore to read. At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (where the receptionist's cubicle still houses an IBM Selective typewriter) is a display room with half a dozen prototype six-million-pixel AMLCD screens. The quiet hum of the room, the bright white lighting, the clean, flat antiseptic surfaces, give the impression of an aspirin commercial. "It was clear to us that no reader was going to read a book off any of the current screens for more than ten minutes," says Malcolm Thompson, the chief technologist. "We hoped to change that." A large annotated poster on the wall illustrates point for point the screen's superiority to paper, as in an old-fashioned magazine ad. This flat panel display is indeed better than commercial screens, but it is neither as flexible nor as mobile as a book, and it still depends on fickle battery power. A twentysomething software marketer who began as an editorial assistant in book publishing points out, "A book requires one good eye, one good light source, and one good finger."

In the heart of official Washington, D.C., down the street from the Capitol and at the same intersection as the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, stands an incongruous statue of Puck, whom the Oxford Companion to English Literature, soon to be issued on CD-ROM, defines as "a goblin," and whom Microsoft Encarta passes over in favor of "puck," which it defines solely as a mouse-like device with crosshairs printed on it, used in engineering applications. The 1930s building next to the statue is the Folger Shakespeare Library. Two flights below the reading room, designed in the style of a Tudor banquet hall, next to which librarians and scholars click quietly on laptops and log on to the Internet's Shaksper reference group for the latest scholarly chatter, is a locked bank gate. Behind it is what librarians call a "short-title catalogue vault"—in other words, a very-rare-book room. This main room—there is another—is rectangular, carpeted in red, and kept permanently at 68 degrees. Sprinkler valves are interspersed among eight evenly spaced shelves of books dating from 1475 to 1640 and lit by harsh institutional light. Of these books 180 are the only copies of their titles left in the world: you can spot them by the small blue slips reading "Unique" which modestly poke out from their tops. At the end of the room is a long shelf on which stacks of oversize volumes rest on their sides: these are nearly a third of the surviving First Folio editions of the plays of Williams Shakespeare. When the First Folios were printed, in the 1620s, printing was still an inexact art. Each page had to be checked by hand, and the volumes are full of mistakes: backward type, ill-cut pages, and variant lines. Several copies lack the 1602 tragedy Troilus and Cressida, owing to a copyright dispute. And yet, 370 years after they came off the printing press, you can still pull down these books and read them. The pages are often lightly cockled and foxed, because the folio was printed on mid-priced rag paper, but the type is still bright and the volume falls open easily. You can balance it on your lap and run your finger along the page to feel the paper grain in that sensuous gesture known to centuries of book readers: here is knowledge.

In 1620 Francis Bacon ranked printing, along with gunpowder and the compass, as one of the three inventions that had "changed the appearance and state of the whole world." Indeed, the existence of multiple identical copies of texts that are nearly indelibly recorded, permanently retrievable, and widely decipherable has determined so much of modern history that what the world would be like without printing can only be guessed at. More books likely came into existence in the fifty years after the Gutenberg Bible than in the millennium that preceded it. "Printing was a huge change for Western culture," says Paul Saffo, who studies the effect of technology on society at the Institute for the Future, in Menlo Park (where the receptionist also uses an IBM Selectric). "The dominant intellectual skill before the age of print was the art of memory." And now we may be going back.

For the question may not be whether, given enough time, CD-ROMS and the Internet can replace books, but whether they should. Ours is a culture that has made a fetish of impermanence. Paperbacks disintegrate, Polaroids fade, video images wear out. Perhaps the first novel ever written specifically to be read on a computer and to take advantage of the concept of hypertext—the structuring of written passages to allow the reader to take different paths through the story—was Rob Swigart's Portal, published in 1986 and designed for the Apple Macintosh, among other computers of its day. The Apple Macintosh was superseded months later by the more sophisticated Macintosh SE, which, according to Swigart, could not run his hypertext novel. Over time people threw out their old computers (fewer and fewer new programs could be run on them), and so Portal became for the most part unreadable. A similar fate will befall literary works of the future if they are committed not to paper but to transitional technology like diskettes, CD-ROMS, and Unix tapes—candidates, with eight-track tapes, Betamax, and the Apple Macintosh, for rapid obscurity. "It's not clear, with fifty incompatible standards around, what will survive," says Ted Nelson, the computer pioneer, who has grown disenchanted with the forces commercializing the Internet. "The so-called information age is really the age of information lost." Software companies don't care—early moviemakers didn't worry that they were filming on volatile stock. In a graphic dramatization of this mad dash to obsolescence, in 1992 the author William Gibson, who coined the term "cyberspace," created an autobiographical story on computer disc called "Agrippa." "Agrippa" is encoded to erase itself entirely as the purchaser plays the story. Only thirty-five copies were printed, and those who bought it left it intact. One copy was somehow pirated and sent out onto the Internet, where anyone could copy it. Many users did, but who and where is not consistently indexed, nor are the copies permanent—the Internet is anarchic. "The original disc is already almost obsolete on Macintoshes," says Kevin Begos, the publisher of "Agrippa." "Within four or five years it will get very hard to find a machine that will run it." Collectors will soon find Gibson's story gone before they can destroy it themselves.