A NEW BOOK, whoopee

I just received a package, from Lulu Press, which contained three draft versions of my NEW BOOK, Preserving Your Digital Revolution Heritage: If Not You, Who--If Not Now, When?

While it is not yet available for the excitable reading public {to my surprise actually this morning}, I am going to describe it anyway for you.   Here's the cover story:

Tips and techniques for IDENTIFYING, CAPTURING, and PRESERVING company histories from alumni--our Digital Revolution is too important to leave up to the few historians who try to cover it. 

Your history is OUR history. And too many companies have contributed too many ideas / products / services to the Digital Revolution for historians to keep up. While the participants are still alive, YOU must help to IDENTIFY, CAPTURE and PRESERVE the records for these people and these companies. This book tells you how to do that--simply, easily, with much emotional value in it for you. 

The events, people and companies that have created the Digital Revolution for the world are still living, but unless their thoughts and words are captured now, they;ll be lost forever. This book describes how YOU can take matters into your own hands, and with a few colleagues decide how to identify, capture, and preserve the key historical records of the company or organization with which you are most familiar. Historians can interpret and write the history later if the artifacts, moods, events, and personalities of the participants are captured now. Otherwise, history of the orgins of the most important revolution of civilization's long march will be irretrievable

The interesting thing for me was the difference in the three versions.

The first version is the way I usually create these small books--monographs, really--which is a standard-sized paperback with color covers and black/while interior for all illustrations.

This time I did a second book, still paperback with standard size, standard paper, but full-color pages as well as color covers.

The third book is hardbound, with 'better paper' and full color pages.

The first is priced at $12.95 with a 15% discount, ($11.01 net); the second for $14.95 with no discount, and the third at $39.95 with no discount.   All three priced thus earn the same royalty--says lots about the production cost profile!

There are twelve illustrations listed on the Figures page; only one is truly enhanced by using color, so it is dubious that there is enough value in the color version to make it 'the standard'

The hardbound book is nice to hold, but mygawd, at that price for 132 pages, you'd have to be nuts to think this is the way to go.

So, we'll probably 'tune' the standard version a bit. and then I'll let you know it is available.  Stand by with your prospective orders, and get ready to become a historian of sorts for your own career!