These days, it seems as though all anyone can talk about is the Web – as in the World Wide Web, the sound-and-picture portion of that vast network of computers people call the Internet (or the Information Superhighway, or one of a dozen other trendy sobriquets).

To those who have been wired for so long they can’t remember when they didn’t have an e-mail address, the value and attraction of the Internet is unassailable. Others may take some convincing, however – there has been a spate of books recently questioning the benefits of what MIT Media Lab pioneer Nicholas Negroponte calls “being digital.”

Setting up shop on the World Wide Web may not be for everyone, but it is a cheap and relatively easy way for both individuals and corporations to keep in touch and get their message out, whatever that message may be. Many companies, for example, are realizing that the Web can be a low-cost addition to their existing marketing and customer support.

Done well, a Web presence can add a lot of value even for a very large company. Federal Express was one of the first companies with a comprehensive Web site, which it integrated with its package tracking system. Customers can now track their own packages through FedEx’s site, which has garnered the company not only satisfied customers but a lot of free publicity.

On the personal side, much has been made of the fact that the Web makes every individual a potential publisher, and that it is the greatest revolution since the Gutenberg press. This is a tad hyperbolic, but it does have the hint of truth – the only form of self-publishing this cheap and easy until now involved a pail of glue and an armful of posters.

Already there are hundreds of so-called zines alive and well on the Web – magazines, literary journals, and other publications that until now were stapled together in someone’s basement. At the upper end of the scale are sites such as Salon (http://www.salon1999.com). A declaration on its Web site reads: “Journalism has become a pitiful giant, ensnarled by commercial formulas and political tribalism. Where once its voice shook mountains, it now squeaks cautiously and banally. The Net allows publishers to burst these bonds, to howl again.”

Howling or not, it also allows individual authors to supplement the promotion that their publishers provide, or even to effectively self-publish. Jared Mitchell’s book The Invincible was published recently by Lester to good reviews, but attention was hard to come by.

The author decided after reading an article in Toronto Computes magazine that the Web was a cheap and effective way of promoting his book. Computer literate, but far from a typical propeller-head, Mitchell bought a scanner and started “surfing” the Internet, looking at other people’s Web sites in search of design ideas.

After teaching himself HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the lingua franca of the Web), Mitchell designed a series of pages about his book, featuring relevant photos, a series of reviews, and ordering information – including telephone numbers of bookstores. Publicizing his use of the Web got Mitchell more attention than had been paid to his book when it was just a regular novel.

Some small publishers are using the Web in much the same way – like Biddle Publishing. Biddle, the site states, “is a small press located on the Maine coast… Although our titles do not appear on The New York Times bestseller list or fill tables in bookstore chains across the country, they are selected with the ambitious aim of making a difference in people’s lives.” There is no question the Web can make small operations such as Biddle more viable.

Addison-Wesley is one of the larger publishers with an established presence on the Web (http://www.aw.com). Through its site the company not only promotes existing titles, but allows individuals from the markets it is trying to serve – such as the educational market – to contribute comments and suggestions for new books.

At Penguin (http://www.penguin.com/usa) the company has a full-blown bookstore-style Web site that allows you to choose a book – for example, Microsoft’s billionaire chairman Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead – and then read excerpts online, read a biography, and find a bookstore to order it from. You can even download a movie clip of Gates.

On February 11, a CD-ROM company called OverDrive Systems announced a joint venture with Simon & Schuster to allow the publisher to use a single electronic production process to create content that can be distributed over the Web, in CD-ROM or on disk. Simon & Schuster, the company said, plans to allow hundreds of book titles to be searched and viewed online – and in the future even ordered electronically.

If you’re interested in setting up a Web presence either for yourself individually or for your business, here’s a sampling of some recent books on the subject:

The New Internet Business Book, by Jill Ellsworth and Matthew V. Ellsworth, is part of a series of marketing books related to the Internet that the pair have written. This one, which has been updated and revised, presents a good overview of the Web and how it works, and helps present the business case for why the Web is useful.

The authors make their points with concise and easily understood examples – such as the fact that a traditional mailing of 1,000 pieces of marketing material can cost several hundred dollars, whereas carefully directed e-mail costs barely anything and arrives much faster. This is a well thought-out book for anyone trying to convince his or her employer there are ways they can use the Web.

HTML for the World Wide Web, by Elizabeth Castro, consists primarily of illustrations, something that could be good or bad depending on how much you know about computers and HTML programming already. Although putting HTML codes into your text to display it on the Web is not difficult – in fact, it’s not really “programming” at all – it still probably requires more explanation than this book gives.

However, if you know a bit already about how Web pages and HTML work, this is a handy guide that you might want to keep near your computer, in case you forget how to get text to flow around the edge of an image, or how to make an image change size without having to use a fancy image-manipulation program.

The author of World Wide Web Marketing, Jim Sterne, runs a target marketing firm in California. Sterne is well versed in the technology of the Internet and his overview of the phenomenon is concise and understandable. The book also does a good job of describing the ways in which marketing over the Net differs from other forms of communication. Mostly it’s because the Web is what Sterne calls a “pull” instead of a “push” medium. Whereas broadcasting sprays information out in the hope that people respond, the Web makes information available and tries to convince people to come and have a look at it. This is a fundamental shift that companies must understand in order to be effective, the author argues.

The book also has some good examples of corporate Web sites that work well, such as computer maker Silicon Graphics, printer maker Hewlett-Packard and telecommunications giant AT&T.

Sterne takes the reader through each site with pictures of the various Web pages, and dissects how the site helps or hinders the reader’s interaction with the company. This book is an excellent overview of why the Net is important and how best to use it as a marketing tool – while avoiding much of the self-serving hype and BS that clogs up so many other books on this subject.

Weaving the Corporate Web, by Ryan Bernard, is not so much about the Internet or the World Wide Web, but about how companies can use the technology to increase their internal efficiency through the use of corporate “Intranets.” Information-savvy companies are already aware of this kind of technology and using it actively to promote internal communication, the author says.

In the same way that the use of TCP/IP (the foundation of the Internet), hypertext linking, and a Web “browser” can allow anyone to distribute information on the Web easily and cheaply, the author argues that it can do the same within a company, increasing the access between management and employees as well as between departments.

This aspect of the Net isn’t quite as sexy for the average reader as books about hot Web pages, but Bernard makes a convincing case for why corporations avoid this kind of Intranet development at their peril. Companies that do take advantage of it will become more efficient and more versatile, he argues, giving them a leg up on the competition.

Build a World Wide Web Commerce Center comes from a technology company called net.Genesis, which supplies software and expertise to help companies assess their Web sites, and this is a nuts-and-bolts guide to setting up an actual functioning Web server that can handle online transactions.

It assumes that you know (or can quickly learn) how to use sophisticated software such as Windows NT, and that you are familiar with how Internet “protocols” such as TCP/IP work. If you’re not prepared to take on technology assignments such as mapping different IP addresses to various host directories, this book is probably not for you.