The one area where branching narratives and experimental pathways have taken off dramatically is in the design of games, a field that rarely feels compelled to reference books as a point of historical or conceptual origin. The experiment to develop new reading formats would appear to have reached an impasse. However (and it is a large exception) during the same decade the Net has become a fixture in contemporary life. Links and hyperlinks abound. Reading along these networked structures has become a habit, like browsing a newspaper. The vision of a re-configured reading environment has been realized, but not in the way the proponents of electronic book or story space imagined. (Joana Drucker)