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...