Publisher:
Hayden Books
Boy, was I wrong.
Extracting the text of the book proved trivial, as I'd anticipated. By the third edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, I knew what I was doing and had made sections sufficiently modular that I had no trouble pulling out just the basics for this short, 250 page book. The CD-ROM, on the other hand, was a nightmare. The developers didn't have much experience, as it turned out, and the testing process took many months longer than initially thought. By the time we'd beat the CD-ROM into shape, deadlines had come and gone several times.
The CD-ROM turned out pretty well in the end, and the graphics on it (done by a small husband and wife firm called Bughouse Graphics) were gorgeous (they appear on the covers as well). The book was short, to the point, and included the necessary software, thus answering the people who complained about length.
Nice idea, but it never sold well at all. To this day, I really don't know why, but I have to assume that Hayden was so disgusted with how long the CD-ROM took that they lost enthusiasm for marketing the book. They did manage to package it in a box and sell it in the software channel as Internet Interactive for Macintosh, but that sold equally badly.
A planned Windows version of Simply Amazing Internet never materialized, although ironically, it showed up on my royalty statements, sold 17 copies, and had them all returned. I still wonder who bought those 17 copies and returned them, considering the book never existed.