The Best of Pif Magazine Off-Line Short Stories, Poetry, and Essays Selected from PifMagazine.com edited by Camille Renshaw, et al. Fusion, 152 pp., $14.95 The Salon.Com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors An Opinionated, Irreverent Look at the Most Fascinating Writers of Our Time edited by Laura Miller and Adam Begley Penguin, 512 pp., $16.95 Full Frontal Fiction The Best of Nerve.Com edited by Jack Murnighan, et al. Three Rivers, 285 pp., $14 The Smoking Gun A Dossier of Secret, Surprising, and Salacious Documents from the Files of TheSmokingGun.com edited by William Batstone, et al. Little, Brown, 224 pp., $14.95 Dispatches from the Tenth Circle The Best of the Onion edited by Robert Siegel, et al. Three Rivers, 174 pp., $16 Few publishing developments seem to offer as much opportunity as the Internet periodical. Easy to start and cheap to publish, web magazines such as Slate allow editors to update constantly their words and pictures. Instead of arriving in the mail like traditional magazines, the "webzines" are received on one's computer by e-mail or read by going through the Internet to their addresses--available to everyone. The fact is, for immediate news as well as concise information, websites have quickly proved they are indispensable. For more considered kinds of writing, I'm not so sure. Apparently to elevate their cultural status, several Internet periodicals have recently issued books--you remember, those bound things the computer was going to replace?--selected from their disseminations. The assumption appears to be that a book grants an Internet periodical credibility, as indeed it does. Then, too, a self-retrospective selected from any magazine--online or not--makes that publication seem more credible. But these books from Pif, Salon, Nerve, the Smoking Gun, and the Onion do not assuage much skepticism about web magazines. To judge from its self-retrospective, Pif is no better or worse than any of a hundred other nonacademic literary journals, mixing an undistinguished selection of creative writing with equally ordinary interviews of literary celebrities. (The principal exception is a witty parody by Richard K. Weems of "The New New Yorker.") The purpose behind "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" escapes me, as it prints short summaries mostly of commercial writers about whom much other introductory material can be found. Precisely because search engines can locate specific names so efficiently, the Internet is a rich reference library for contemporary subjects, as distinct from a repository for extended criticism of historical material; so that this "Reader's Guide" necessarily competes with other book directories but not with the Internet itself. And loses. Though the book's cover claims it is "opinionated" and "irreverent," my impression was that most of the summaries were culled from publishers' publicity packets. As a website, Nerve.com mixes come-hither ads with fiction--and since the ads are not meant for reprinting, the fiction has to stand on its own literary merits. The result is no great shake, as Nerve.com's "Full Frontal Fiction" is no better or worse than many other anthologies of erotica appearing nowadays with conventional narratives portraying familiar experience. Insofar as the book's title suggests something special, it is a misnomer. As it happens, many of Nerve's writers are moderately famous--Jay McInerney, Mary Gaitskill, Elizabeth Wurtzel, A.M. Homes, among them--indicating that its editors pay well and that revenue from somewhere else must be supporting such literary vanity. (A sign of celebrity publishing is the absence of biographical notes for the authors, the editors assuming that their names must already be familiar.) The major innovation in "Full Frontal Fiction" is running heads printed in the margins, its type perpendicular to the text, facing inwards on both sides. Expect to see that layout feature repeated elsewhere sooner than the fiction reprinted. THE WEBSITE accessible as TheSmokingGun.com was recommended in a recent Yahoo monthly for "Best Expos s," as it publishes previously hidden public documents much as I.F. Stone used to do decades ago. But where Izzy Stone made house calls to repositories, William Batstone and his colleagues at the Smoking Gun exploit the Freedom of Information Act to get government flunkies to deliver embarrassing papers; and where Stone wanted to expose politicians' cover-ups, the gun-smokers deflate mostly vulgar celebrities whom most of us already assumed to be discreditable. The secrets exposed here are less general than specific. Few are genuinely "salacious," contrary to the book's subtitle. Fewer are mind-breaking. The Onion, on the other hand, is an attractively irreverent, politically incorrect online journal that only recently moved from its birthplace in Madison, Wisconsin, to New York. Large in format--nine by twelve inches--"Dispatches from the Tenth Circle" is meant to look like a tabloid newspaper, with several items to a page, each preceded by a headline, some continued on succeeding pages. Each page has as well at least one picture. The result is continuously delightful to a degree that the actual Onion newspaper is not, repeatedly interrupted as it is by ads. The headlines tend to be funnier than the articles beneath them: -U.S. Ambassador to Bulungi Suspected of Making Country Up -Miracle of Birth Occurs for the 83 Billionth Time -I Lost 32 Pounds in 15 Days and Died! -ACLU Defends Nazis' Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters -Thousands Dead in Indonesia Again Consider them a measure of either tastelessness or cultural courage. I found myself reading only the headlines the first time through the book (much as I do in pursuing Mad Magazine's many self-retrospectives, which this resembles). On second reading, I discovered a few marvelous texts, most of them short, and especially recommend from page thirty a self-obituary by a dog put to sleep for "digging in the plants." So much content, even if purportedly selective, makes "Dispatches from the Tenth Circle" look more substantial than the website would suggest. Indeed, to my mind, this book is better. As a book author who appreciates the Internet, especially for allowing me to gather information quickly, I find it interesting that Internet publishers should want their contents preserved in the traditional medium. But these volumes demonstrate a truth not to be forgotten: Genuine books require more content than websites yet offer. A poet and author of many books, Richard Kostelanetz offers more information about himself and his publications on richardkostelanetz.com.