Update Announcements by Craig Stark #22, 12 July 2004

Special thanks go out to all of you who subscribed to the new Gold Edition BookThinker and purchased individual back issues. The response was great. A few questions came up this week, and I'll try to clarify things. The Gold Edition and the free, weekly BookThinker are separate publications and must be subscribed to separately. Both are in email format. For those of you who haven't subscribed to the Gold Edition, the special charter rate of $10 annually will expire on July 31, 2004, after which the regular rate of $20 annually will apply. We accept PayPal, personal checks issued from USA banks, and domestic and international money orders. Click here. for more information. Finally, with the single exception of Premium Content migrating to the Gold Edition (and expanding), the weekly BookThinker will not change in format or content - that is, it hasn't become chopped liver. We'll continue to publish the best and most helpful information we can.

Today's BookThinker Update offers some marketing angles that may not have occurred to you. One of them has its genesis in the Materials Research Laboratory, home of the historic Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer, at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. When I was a student in the early 1970's, I walked by this building nearly every day on the way to class. At the time, little did I know that the Sigma V was one of 15 nodes on a network that was to ultimately become the Internet as we know it today. In 1971, Michael Hart was given what's been estimated to be one hundred million dollars worth of time on this computer. One hour and forty-seven minutes later (the story goes), he launched what has evolved into one of the most valuable Internet services ever offered - Project Gutenberg. If this is new to you, definitely take a look at Project Gutenberg.