From...

by Mickey Butts

(IDG) -- Nineteen ninety-eight will go down as the year the Internet Economy was enshrined in the most immortal of all media, the book. Some titles that generated good buzz: aol.com, by Kara Swisher; The Microsoft File, by Wendy Goldman Rohm; Burn Rate, by Michael Wolff; and Competing on Internet Time, by Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie.

"Business books have answered what the Internet is and are now about how people are making money," says Mary Bahr, publicity director of the Free Press, the New York-based publisher of Competing on Internet Time, which Microsoft subpoenaed for its authors' sources.

The days of Michael Wolff's NetGuide - a print compilation of URLs - seem almost quaint compared to today's deluge of sophisticated e-commerce analysis and fly-on-the-wall Web history. A few trends:

The .Com people

In 1998, over 10 books with ".com" in the title vied for readers' attention, according to an unscientific survey of books on sale at - where else? - Amazon.com. Quicker than a pre-IPO tech company could add e-commerce to its business plan, book- store shelves filled with titles like Customers.com, Enterprise.com, WallStreet.com, StrikingItRich.com and even Tom Clancy's Ruthless.com.

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"Dot-com is like the radicchio of business books," says Kara Swisher, a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Swisher's aol.com was a blow-by-blow history of the company Netheads loved to ignore - until it bought Netscape, that is.

Swisher says she argued with the marketing honchos at Random House to name the book @aol.com, to play off the much-maligned e-mail address. "Random House said they didn't want to be at the mercy of a college student who couldn't file correctly," she says, and so chose the more filing-friendly title.

The Net whisperers

The release of Competing on Internet Time marked an important publishing-industry milestone: Journalists' source materials were subpoenaed in the Justice Department's lawsuit against Microsoft. Cusumano and Yoffie's book about Netscape's long-running battle with Microsoft was one of the year's many titles - including Burn Rate, aol.com, Speeding the Net, Barbarians Led by Bill Gates and The Microsoft File - that turned insider gossip into instant history.

In 1999, expect a style of book not seen since the mid-1990s: management books using Microsoft as a case study. Coming out in February from McGraw-Hill is The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management: How to Think and Act Like a Microsoft Manager and Take Your Company to the Top.

Considering how things are going in the trial, though, you might want to think twice before acting like a Microsoft manager.

Amazon.com's Top 10 Best-Selling Internet Economy Books of 1998

1. The Electronic Day Trader by Marc Friedfertig and George West

2. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore (1995)

3. Unleashing the Killer App by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui

4. Blur by Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer

5. Burn Rate by Michael Wolff

6. Information Rules by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian

7. Customers.com by Patricia B. Seybold

8. New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly

9. Competing on Internet Time by Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie

10. aol.com by Kara Swisher

Predictions for 1999

Twelve-step guides to e-commerce nirvana were published faster than publishers could find Net gurus to pen them. Look for the ghosts of last year's author-signing frenzy to continue into the next year. Some predictions:

• The Silicon Valley press corps won't miss a beat cashing in on the Internet history genre. Titles are expected from Michael Lewis (formerly of the New York Times and Slate), the New Yorker's John Heilemann and Wired's Po Bronson.

• Expect more Internet company execs to bypass the middleman and go straight to the masses with their stories. It's only a matter of time before Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs get tired of saying no to book editors and follow the lead of Lotus' Jeff Papows (Enterprise.com, November 1998), Pathfinder's Bruce Judson (Hyperwars, January 1999) and Michael Dell (Direct From Dell, due out in March). Watch as second-tier tech journalists scramble for a piece of the ghostwriting pie.

• Book publishers will partner like mad with name-brand e-commerce players to spice up an already saturated market. What started with Blur (with the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation) and Blueprint to the Digital Economy (with the Alliance for Converging Technologies) should continue into 1999 with such titles as the Free Press' The Clickable Company, expected in July in partnership with Arthur Andersen.

• The .com in titles will be superseded by e- as the modifier of choice.