Publisher:
Hayden BooksInternet Explorer Kit for Macintosh was my second book, and I'm still quite pleased
with how it was written. My friend Bill Dickson and I wrote it entirely in dialog
format, which was and is quite unusual for a computer book. However, we felt that
it was important to convey the personal sense of the Internet, and one way to do
that was to talk about our experiences and to tell our stories in the first person.
Ironically, as Bill and I split up parts of the book to write, we became good at
writing text for the other person. Some of the funniest parts under our respective
names (and I think it's a funny book) were in fact written by the other person.
This book sold well, for a computer book, but nothing even approaching the sales
of the first edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
(or even the first four months of that book).The problem, I believe, was that there
was a major communications disconnect with Hayden while working on the book (I won't
get into the ugly reasons why this might have happened). The end result of this communications
disconnect is that the inside of the book, everything but the cover and the disk,
was exactly what I wanted to write. Unfortunately, I didn't like or agree with the
title, the cover, and the very inclusion of a disk. The book was supposed to be the
introduction to the Internet for our grandparents, in that it was an easy read, didn't
assume that the user either had or wanted an Internet account, and generally stuck
to a platform-independent tone. I think the other problem the book suffered was that
it was unusual and difficult to describe easily, which meant that the sales people
never understood it at all (since book sales people often seldom read a book, relying
instead on descriptions from others).
For the most part, readers liked the book, although it did generate more opinion
than Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, which wasn't surprising given the opinionated
contents. If it had done better, I think Bill and I would have been interested in
working on a second edition, in which we could have fixed the rough edges and worked
out the problems with the cover essentially advertising a different book. Ah well,
such is life.
Portions of Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh made their way into the second
and third editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh
because they were the best way to convey the general sense of using the Internet,
particularly for the more interactive uses like IRC and MUDs (which I had little
interest in revisiting as well). For the fourth edition
of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, I finally removed the excerpt and incorporated
the information in other ways.