Time Warner has put _Time_, _People_, _Entertainment Weekly_, and a shelf full of other magazines in a colorful, well-done area of the World Wide Web. Readers can praise and flame the editors and each other. Hearst magazines have their own area. _PC Magazine_, one of the giants of the Ziff-Davis chain, enraged many Netfolks with clueless articles suggesting a rather thorough ignorance of the Internet and its reasons for existence. But guess what. Now Ziff-Davis has a wonderful Web area with generous samples from its magazines, including _PC_. The German newsmagazine _Der Spiegel_ is on the World Wide Web, too, complete with some news in English; from Japan, specialized publications serve Net audiences ranging from gays to office workers. I learned of the most dramatic use of cyberspace by a magazine just as I was finishing this book. _Omni_, the popular science publication, said it would forsake monthly paper editions in favor of a version on America Online, augmented by just four print editions, one each quarter. It expected to save some $4 million a year. The newsletter _Interactive Week Publishing Alert_ raised some valid questions—copies of back articles from _Omni_ were too hard to locate—but even if the grand experiment failed, the model was out there. A major publication was more or less forsaking pulped wood in favor of computer networks. Book publishers are catching up with newspapers and magazines. Time Warner, Random House, Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill use the Internet for promotion, and they will distribute more and more of their books this way. Free classics like _A Tale of Two Cities_ have been a staple of the Net for years, thanks to voluntary efforts such as Project Gutenberg. And now you can pay a few dollars to download a short story by Stephen King or works by many others. Meanwhile, however, some old-fogey publishers view the Internet as an unfathomable virus transmitted via cable. That’s especially true of the book business. People in it fear a massive bootlegging of their wares. Using the Net, you can even pirate paper books; there is no technical reason why machines cannot scan the latest from Philip Roth or Tom Clancy, convert their novels to bits and bytes, and zap them to your friends in Juneau. Software-based copy protection could help safeguard electronic books. But I myself think there are other solutions as well—for example, a national library fund to make free or low-cost books practical and reduce the incentive for bootlegging. Paper publishers also complain that if electronic books are cheaper to create and distribute, manuscripts will receive less editing. With a good library system in effect, however, a way would exist to highlight works of merit—marketers would enjoy less clout and we’d see fewer best-sellers on astrology and more on history. And without the distribution costs, more money could go to writers and editors.