Publisher:
Osborne/McGraw-HillWhile I was working on the DigitalThink
course about the Internet, David Rogelberg
called again and said that Osborne/McGraw-Hill was looking for someone to write an
Internet book about AT&T WorldNet. The catch was, they wanted it on the shelves
by February 1st of 1997, and David was calling in the middle of November, 1996. Even
if I hadn't been already occupied with the DigitalThink course, that kind of a deadline
would have been almost impossible, given that it takes several months to write a
book and those months overlapped with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons.
So I said no.
The next day, David called back and said, "They're still interested. Why don't
you figure out a more reasonable schedule and propose that?"
So, I said that I could hand it in at the end of February, which gave me time to
finish off the DigitalThink course and deal with the holiday season. I fully expected
Osborne to tell me, politely, to take a hike.
Instead, they agreed, and thus began one of my more interesting projects. First of
all, I had to work with AT&T since this was the official book, and second, I
had to buy and use a PC running Windows 95, since this was a cross-platform book.
I learned a lot about the PC while writing the book (which I did on my Power Macintosh
8500, controlling the PC when necessary via Timbuktu Pro from Farallon), and overall,
the book went well. The hardest part was getting permission for every screenshot
of a Web page, something that probably added several days of work to the task.
It remains to be seen how well this book does, since it's in many ways a second generation
Internet book. Whereas Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
and its many versions and editions concentrated on the technical aspects of the Internet,
The Official AT&T WorldNet Web Discovery Guide concentrates instead on how to
use Internet resources like Web catalogs and search engines, and even more importantly,
it focuses on how you use the Internet in your everyday life, especially if you aren't
a computer geek. That's where I think the interesting work is being done on the Internet
these days, and I hope the book reflects that.
....time passes....
This book has now been out for a number of months, and it's been disappointing. All
the comments I've received have been positive, but the simple fact of the matter
is that the publisher and I thought that AT&T would buy a large number of the
books to use as promotions of various sorts for AT&T WorldNet Service. It seems
that there was a conflict between several departments at AT&T WorldNet though,
and the book was caught in the middle. I can't tell you how frustrated I was when
I learned that fact.