The 2016 Downloadable Edition (17th Edition) of afternoon, a story is a significant departure from all other editions. As a downloadable digital file, it lacks the physicality of previous editions presented on various media formats—floppy disk, CD-ROM, and the USB Stick. Unlike the 1997 Norton Web Edition, the only other edition that was not packaged on a physical media format, the 17th comes to readers as a Dropbox link to a .dmg file, a format commonly used for moving apps to a computing device. Like the 16th Edition published on the Stick, it provides none of the contextual materials connecting it to literature or past editions, like quotes from Coover and other critics, promotion as a "postmodern classic," an author bio, the image of Joyce on the cover, a cover graphic, etc. The edition exists outside of the system of references with which it had long been associated as a novel, hypertext or otherwise.

A hint of this shift occurred over a decade before when the 14th Edition of afternoon, a story, published in 2007, changed the launcher icon from the yoni symbol to the Storyspace software logo. Even at the time it seemed odd for the novel to lose this connection to its past, but since Eastgate Systems, Inc. had taken this step with all works it had migrated to Storyspace 2.0 published on CD-ROM, there was consistency in the decision. Looking back, it serves as a harbinger for other technological changes shaping the public's relationship with electronic media. Just a year before, in 2006, cloud technology became mainstreamed with Amazon through its web services. Users were becoming accustomed to downloading media from sites and interacting with files instead of handling physical objects like floppy disks and CD-ROMs that had been used by Eastgate Systems, Inc. for its publications. By 2016 when the 17th Edition appeared, the public had been reading novels on Kindle for well over a decade and via the Apple iBook app for six. An electronic novel like Joyce's was no longer expected to look like a print book, much less possess the physicality of one. It could, in fact, exist as a file. What this study of the various editions of the novel lays bare is this transformation of afternoon, a story, from its association as a novel born out of print culture sensibilities to its current instantiation as a work of electronic media.

It also demonstrates the challenges to keep this important work alive and in the hands of readers for over three decades. That the novel has been presented in six different formats—floppy disk, website, excerpt in a book, CD-ROM, USB Stick, and downloadable digital file—withstanding technological upgrades to both hardware and software and the growing popularity of steaming media—speaks to afternoon, a story's legacy and its impact on contemporary literary culture. They also speak to the evolution of hypermedia over time: the loss of physicality of the object, the move away from features and attributes associated with book and print culture, and the changing nature of publishing in the Digital Age. afternoon, a story may have been considered a "postmodern classic" in the 1990s, but today in the second decade of the 21st century it endures as a literary classic, timeless and significant.