SOURCE: "Are These Books, or What? CD-ROM and the Literary Industry," in The New York Times Book Review, August 14, 1994, pp. 3, 20-1.

[In the following essay, Lyall discusses the future of books and CD-Roms.]

This spring William H. Gates, the plugged-in chairman of the Microsoft Corporation and a man who lives for his computer, announced that he wanted to publish a definitive 300-page discussion of his views on the information revolution—where it had been and where it was going. But when it came time to choose a format, Mr. Gates rejected the familiar tools of his trade: on-line services, floppy disks, CD-ROM's, all the hardware and all the software. He turned to a technology that has been around since the mid-15th century. He decided to sell his book as a book.

You can't get more conventional. Books are cunning and resilient creatures. They have survived world wars...