_Bless This Food: Amazing Grace in Praise of Food_ was an example of prime material for hypertext. The paper book bought together food-related prayers from many times and places. But everything was contained. You couldn’t wander outside the printed pages. Thanks to Fillmore, however, you could click on Buddhist-related material and see a Buddha’s image piped in from the Smithsonian. You could even e-mail the author of _Bless_, Adrian Butash. Fillmore wasn’t just selling the book itself—she was offering it as a “dashboard” that could take you to related material on the Net. Certainly the Smithsonian hadn’t had _Bless_ in mind when it posted the picture of Buddha. However, through the pointers in the electronic edition, you could learn of this image and view it in just the right context; that, after all, was the splendor of the Web. Quite honestly, then, Fillmore could charge $25 for a book that sold in hardback from Delacorte for $18.95. She was giving you _more_ for your money. Besides, if you proposed new links and she liked them, you would receive some royalties. You, the reader, could be part of the book and the author’s life. We could all be editors. As a writer, I had somewhat mixed feelings about this. I loved e-mail from readers. But I was already spending too many hours a day on electronic correspondence of one kind or another. I hated the idea of suffering a constant stream of e-mail from Project X when I wanted to move on to Project Y. If this model won out, writers would have to be much choosier about the projects they took on—knowing that publishers expected more commitment. Given the deluge of 50,000 titles a year that readers face just from U.S. publishers, more than a few people would enjoy such a prospect. But they shouldn’t grow too complacent. With electronic publishing much cheaper than the paper variety, we might eventually see 100,000 commercially published titles a year. I, for one, wouldn’t mind as long as quality and royalties don’t suffer. The problem is not too many books, but rather the need for better software to sort through them—or for more hypertext editors to issue good pointers. That is one reason why I loved the idea of publishers selling pointers as well as actual material.