ANOTHER guide to the Internet? Peachpit Press bills Aether Madness as 鈥渁 radical challenge to the publishing industry鈥�, and they are right: the publishers have put the entire text of this 300-page paperback on the World Wide Web, where anyone with Internet access can read the book for free.
In fact, much more than the text is available online. A visit to the WWW site offers several 鈥渢ours鈥� of the book, and selecting the 鈥淕reen鈥� tour takes you to a hypertext document with links to Gopher sites, mailing lists and other facilities around the world. In less than a minute I was browsing through a Who鈥檚 Who of entomologists in Brazil.
In Aether Madness, Gary Wolf and Michael Stein have given us a good mixture of the nutty and the hard-headed, with one chapter on the nun who runs the world鈥檚 best AIDS information resource and another on 鈥淭he War on the War on Drugs鈥�, which tells you how to read 鈥淧henylethylamines I Have Known and Loved鈥� online.
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No illustrations, no guides to CompuServe, but lots of information from two expert surfers. And you can read the book-but not the online version for half an hour without getting a headache or stiff neck. Just tap in for the WWW site.
An Offbeat Guide to the Online World, pp 297
Peachpit Press