Want to see a truly horrible interface? Check out Graduate Prospects, an "e-zine" of the worst possible kind. Still, it provides a great starting example of the practical consequences of "links are dead". I'm on a 2Mb connection, but the only thing I seem to see is "Page loading" on every page. 
Didn't anyone sit down and think about this interface? Or maybe even that minor little issue about how it's an Internet publication, not a magazine and that screens are not shaped like magazine pages.
If, by sheer force of chance, there were something even vaguely interesting in these "e-publications", there's no way for me to link to them. There's no way for me to copy the text from them and stick it in a text document or put it on my phone or iPod or PDA.
If you want to learn good design by avoiding bad design, this interface is one of the crappiest examples. It's provided by a company called NxtBook Media. The funny thing is that you'd think they might understand the point of permalinks, since the company has a blog, for crying out loud. They do things like point to a very apposite quote from Jeff Jarvis but don't actually heed the advice it contains.
Perhaps we're all wrong. Perhaps all our sacred cows are just that. Perhaps the best way to present text is in giant JavaScript-pumped image files delivered without permalinks. Perhaps having singing-dancing shit all over your homepage really is a good design aesthetic. Somehow I don't think they are though, and simply transplanting the magazine or catalogue format on to the Internet really is a bad way of getting content out there.
