Peachpit Press Posts Hip New Guide Online for Free

December, 1994, Berkeley, CA--Peachpit Press has announced a radical
challenge to the publishing industry. Aether Madness: An Offbeat Guide to
the Online World, by Gary Wolf and Michael Stein, is being simultaneously
released as a trade paperback and as a set of free hypertext pages on the
World Wide Web.

The free version is not an excerpt. It is not a serialization. It is the
whole book, from cover to cover, complete with hypertext links.

Wolf, a writer for Wired magazine and an editor at HotWired, Wired 's new
cyberstation on the World Wide Web, argues that good information can be
simultaneously given away and sold. "It is not an either/or proposition,"
he says. "The new media have changed the rules, and one of the strange
consequences is that when you give information away it becomes more
valuable."

Aether Madness is a highly readable travelog that chronicles the authors'
two-year journey through the online world. In Aether Madness, technology
fades into the background. The authors visit with mycologists,
musicologists, UFO fanatics, smalltown evangelicals, and hard-core sexual
exhibitionists, among other inhabitants of the limitless territory of the
aether. The book contains the complete electronic addresses of all the
destinations; in the online version of Aether Madness these addresses will
be hypertext "links" to the sites themselves. Aether Madness is the first
non-fiction book to be simultaneously published as a trade paperback and
as a set of hypertext pages on the World Wide Web.

"We love books," says Wolf, "and we believe in them. There is absolutely no
chance that putting Aether Madness online will interfere with publishing
it on paper. In fact, the two versions reinforce each other. Readers who
encounter Aether Madness on the Web will be more likely to buy the book,
and book-buyers will benefit from also using the hypermedia version on the
Web."

Aether Madness co-author Michael Stein is an aether activist whose current
projects include an interactive online map of chemical contamination in
the United States. For Stein, the Aether Madness experiment is designed to
demonstrate the power of free information. "Give it away," said Stein. "If
you know the Net, you know that being open-handed is the key to having an
effect. Money is not the only currency in the digital age, contrary to
what some would have us believe. Aether Madness taps into some other
primal drives: attention span and the human imagination. We refuse to put
price tags on those."

To find out more about Aether Madness on the World Wide Web, send any
e-mail message to aether@igc.apc.org. To view Aether Madness on the World
Wide Web, point your Web browser to http://www.aether.com/Aether/

Price: $21.95, Size: 350 pages, 7"x 9", ISBN 1-56609-020-2
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Travel Guide for the Online World

September 1994--Berkeley, CA--Setting off for Uzbekistan without a good
travel book would be a foolish thing to do. So would heading for the
myriad trails of the electronic universe without a copy of Aether Madness:
An Offbeat Guide to the Online World. Like all good travel books, this one
gives an insider's glimpse into the culture and practices of the locals,
plus plenty of solid information about each place and its people.

Aether Madness shows the vastness and diversity of the aether--the universe
of electronic discussion. By hitching a ride onto the Internet,
independent BBSs, and commercial online services, travelers can meet and
talk with all kinds of people, from mycophagists to musicologists, Dead
Heads to Limbaughites, and paranormal researchers to born-again
Christians. They can celebrate Shabbat at an online synagogue, visit a
Prozac support group, check out the catalogs of libraries far away,
download books in the public domain, view movie stills, and cruise the sex
boards. They can check out labor battles, legal advice, and stock market
fraud.

Lively, hip, and humorous, Aether Madness is divided into four sections:
Orientation; Travel Tales (covers all of the above topics and many more,
giving simple, clear instructions to use them, plus recommendations of
personal favorites); Glossary (this is a useful, fun guide to cyberspace
terms); and Resource Guide. This book is for armchair travelers, dedicated
aethernauts, high-level hackers, and the just-curious.

Authors Gary Wolf and Michael Stein have spent thousands of hours exploring
the online world. Gary lives in San Francisco, where he writes regularly
for Wired magazine. Michael is an online consultant and program officer
for the EcoNet and LaborNet networks.
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Peachpit Press
2414 Sixth St, Berkeley, CA 94710
800-283-9444,  510-548-4393,  fax 510-548-5991

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