Publisher:
Hayden BooksIt was an amazing feat. It also almost killed me.
The writing was hard enough. The book got a lot longer than the third edition, but it dropped old information and appendices like a snake shedding last year's skin. But, I'm good, I'm fast, and I managed to finish the writing on schedule, save for one chapter. That was the installation chapter, and it was held up by the wee fact that the programmer was late, a fact that he blamed in large part on the fact that he hadn't received a signed contract from Hayden until after the deadline had come and gone. The delay drove me nuts, and although it worked out in the end, I nearly went mad with the stress of coordinating late software with my installation chapter and the burning of the CD-ROM master disks, which I was doing myself.
It would have been fine after I recovered, but for the fact that Hayden seemed to have stopped marketing the book. Best-sellers, especially in the competitive Internet book market (which went from five books to probably 3,000 in the lifespan of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh), don't sell themselves. They need support from the publisher, and as far as I could tell, it was lacking. The initial sell-in of both the book and the Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh 3.0 boxed version in the software channel were good, but the sell-through after that didn't maintain the momentum that the other editions had built up.
I tried. Power Computing bought and gave away 1,000 copies of the book at Macworld Boston that August. I signed each and every copy in the space of three hours. It was hard, and my hand nearly fell off, but it was still an awfully good time.
Will there be a fifth edition? Good question. The Internet has changed since Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh first came out, and it has changed in a big way. Parts of the book are no longer necessary (it's easy to get all the software you need these days, so the inclusion of MacTCP and the installer and all that isn't nearly as big of a help). Also, there are so many new Internet programs for the Mac, especially on the server side of things (that was one of the big additions to the fourth edition), that trying to write about all of them might be too much to finish before they all change again.
We'll see...