Sophistication & Simplicity shipping
| Filed under History; 4 comments. |
Blatant plug alert!
I’m writing today to promote Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life & Times of the Apple II Computer, by Dr. Steven Weyhrich, long-time Apple II user. In just the past three years, Steve has become a member of the KansasFest committee, written for Juiced.GS, and been guest #4 on the Open Apple podcast. But much longer ago than that, he began chronicling the story of the Apple II, which today is available on his website, Apple II History. That site has served as the source for his book, a hardcover that began shipping yesterday.
Turning a website into a book can be an easy feat: aggregate some blog posts into a PDF and ship it off to the Kindle store. Or download some Wikipedia entries and reformat them for sale under Creative Commons. But Steve has taken no such shortcuts with his opus. He has extensively researched and re-written significant portions of his history as well as created new chapters. I’ve been aware of this process not only as he pinged me for my professional perspective on various editing matters, but also through interviewing Steve for Juiced.GS:
I have a new chapter that is all about KansasFest; that is exclusive to the print book. There are some other places where I’ve added material that I did not also mirror to the Web site, but I did not keep close track of it. After a while, I stopped changing the Web site and the book material at the same time, because it became tedious to do both. All of my most recent changes have been book-specific.
The final stretch was the longest: some online stores still reference the book’s original launch date of April 1, 2013!
Steve also revealed that this book has been a long time in coming:
I actually made an effort to make this a book some years ago and had some interest from Quality Computers in publishing it back in the 1990s. However, Quality had lots of things it was trying to do at the time and decided that publishing a book was not something it wanted to add to the list.
Now the book is finally a real thing — but not thanks to the democratization of self-publishing. Unlike many recent and excellent books about the Apple II, Sophistication & Simplicity is not self-published, instead having been picked up by Variant Press. You can buy the book today at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble (ISBN 9780986832277).
Congratulations, Steve! Thank you for taking the time to preserve the history of our favorite computer in so permanent a medium. I look forward to getting ahold of my copy and getting you to sign it at KansasFest 2014. In the meantime, the hard part is behind you, so step away from the computer and take a breather — you’ve earned it.
Wow, I’m not sure I believe the Amazon seller who claims to have one used copy already.
And upon closer inspection it seems the same seller offers a New copy cheaper than the used copy.
Fantastic! Looking forward to my pre-ordered copy. Huge thanks to Steve for this effort that benefits the whole Apple II community.
Dr. Weyhrich emailed me about a year to ask about how I was publishing my book. I told him I was self-publishing, but I advised him NOT to go that route until he shopped around for publishers.
My rationale was that no sane publisher would want to take on some boring old book about actually programming the Apple II (my book), but there would be a much greater interest in a history of the Apple II book (his book).
Looks like I was right, and he did get a publisher.