Zeuslike, however, I’ll hurl thunderbolts at HarperCollins and Doubleday. The former published the book that the immigration lawyers in Arizona used to justify the off-topic ads that they had inflicted on thousands of newsgroups. The Canter and Siegel guide was in the same class as astrology books. It talked about spending just $.0333 per thousand users per month to reach 30 million people on the Net. Most of the people, however, can only use e-mail and aren’t on Usenet or the Web. Doubleday erred in other ways. It let Cliff Stoll smear cyberspace as “devoid of warmth and human kindness.” Devoid? A rather all-encompassing word. In both cases the paper publishers were entering an unknown world. To give another example, a _New Yorker_ article lamented the destruction of library catalogues without really telling how electronic libraries could do the job better. The article went on about the handwritten annotations on the cards, and I could see the point here. Couldn’t a card for a Civil War book include an informal recommendation for a book on Antietam or Gettysburg? Must all cross-references be official? So I could appreciate writer Nicholson Baker’s worry about the fate of those beautiful wooden cabinets. What he played down, however, is that technology can let electronic librarians create quick paths from one work to another.[4.7] Far from being exotic nowadays, this technology is the essence of the World Wide Web. So if you looked up a general item on the Civil War, you might see some annotated references to an item on Antietam, and go there instantly with a click of the mouse. Just as wrongly, an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of September 1994 said future electronic books could perish because they used many disk formats. “The End of the Book?” asked the headline over T. J. Max’s doomsaying. But CD-ROMs and books on floppy disk are just transitions. Unless legislators interfere in the most ham-handed of ways, computer networks should be the natural homes for electronic books. They could reach us more cheaply, and in greater varieties, without the bottleneck of physical bookstores. So disk standards should be just plain irrelevant in the end. The true raison d’etre for the Internet is its ability to let many kinds of machines share information without the least worry about floppies or magnetic tape. Most of the time I don’t know if my no-name IBM clone is talking to a Mac or a $5-million mainframe. Besides, we mustn’t preserve books just physically; in a videocentric era we also need to help them survive in the minds of readers, particularly those outside the elite. We should spread books far and wide, then, and make the technology as friendly to words as possible. But tell that to Max. In his eagerness to put down electronic text, Max depicted the _print_ version of _Wired_ magazine as hypocritical. He wrote: