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Books include novels, dictionaries, telephone books, textbooks, anthologies, instruction manuals, proceedings of meetings and directories. The phrase “electronic books” has been applied to some types of CD‐ROM systems, palm‐top CD players, on‐demand text, electronic document systems of various kinds ± in fact to almost any kind of computer‐based text system that needs hyping up for marketing purposes. The future prospects for the electronic book are examined in this article.

This review covers those aspects of communications which are relatively new and will probably have a continuing impact for at least two years — although this forecast, like nearly all other forecasts, is likely to be mostly wrong. A small amount of essential basic material is included — such as the section entitled ‘The bandwidth/speed imperative’, So much effort is being devoted to this subject, particularly in the case of POTS ( Plain Old Telephone System) improvements, that a few words about it seems to be in order.

The terms ‘hypermedia’ and ‘multimedia’ have elastic defini‐tions. ‘Multimedia’ is sometimes used to describe single media systems which embody two kinds of information — text and graphics. In this article ‘multimedia’ will be used to refer to systems combining information presentation from several quite different media.

The Web of Science (WoS) database has been intro‐duced recently by The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), but no applications of it have yet been described as far as I am aware. It is compiled from 8,000 journals providing some 130,000 articles annually, covered in the combined Science (1974 onwards), Social Sciences (1972 onwards) and Arts & Humanities (1975 onwards) Citation Indexes. New journals continue to be added. At present the storage requirements for this data is about 11.5 Gbytes.

It's hard to resist the temptation to produce once again my rather poor attempt at copying Tenniel's sketch from ‘Through The Looking Glass’. The quotation from the book accompanying the sketch shown in Figure 1, is Humpty‐Dumpty's immortal comment on the Indexing Problem.

Nostradamus, a Frenchman who died in 1566, made his reputation through his prophetic but enigmatic book Centuries. He had the wit to make the book so obscure that it is impossible to say whether there are the slightest grounds for his prophetic reputation. He was appointed as physician to Charles IX, but we do not know whether his medical reputation was any better than his prophecies.

A conference entitled ‘Hypertext II’, attended by 200 people (with many on a waiting list), took place at the University of York on 29 and 30 June 1989. Hypertext I, held at the University of Aberdeen in March 1988, yielded ten published papers. This time there were parallel sessions with 18 papers, three symposia with several papers in each, and an exhibition with numerous demonstrations. Ray McAleese, Director of the Teaching Centre at Aberdeen, organised these conferences.