I think it's fair to say that some of those multimedia titles were books, while others were software. Some titles (e.g. Microsoft Bookshelf, Groliers Encyclopedia, etc.) were essentially the print version with multimedia enhancements. Yes, it was packaged as software. On the other hand, that software was there simply because information had to be retrieved and presented. To my knowledge, no standards existed to do so at the time. Of course other titles went much further and were only recognizable as books because they had slightly more text than a video game.

But I do agree with the unusable part. Education titles, which is what this stuff was classified as, was atrocious. Reasonably well written software from that era should work on current hardware (with a 32-bit version). A lot of those programs fall over with Windows XP because the programming was sloppy.