Book publishers on the whole have so far failed to understand
the Internet, something which is rooted in their initial suspicion
of the new media and its implications for the book. Perhaps as
a direct result of this failure, the last couple of years have
seen a steady stream of volumes about the Internet which have
ranged from the ill-informed to the laughably pretentious and
all the way back again – but entirely skipping the bit where someone
says something remotely intelligent or interesting. Ray Hammond’s
Digital Business goes some way towards redressing this
situation, and his method is quite simple: he describes the business
potential of the Internet – and other networks – from a perspective
which embraces most or all of the now traditional values of experienced
Internet users. Privacy is good, open standards is good, the free
flow of information is good, the distributed organisation is good,
the nation state is bad, borders are bad, censorship is bad. Etc.
There’s not a whole lot of news in this book for experienced Internet
users – you don’t need to have been around for too long to know
about burning issues like encryption, the changing shape of copyright,
and so on – but for non-users or new users of the Internet, Digital
Business serves as an excellent primer to many of the most
important issues of the last couple of years and has some sound
analysis along the way. There are interesting sections on pornography
(Hammond sees it as one of the prime drivers of the Internet’s
nascent economy), digital money, the philosophy behind the best
web sites and so on, all of this presented in a simple and unpretentious
way.
The book is supported by a cd rom and a web site where, apparently,
the text of the book is available for free along with all the hyperlinks
referred to in the volume edition. Irritatingly if you have no cd rom drive
and a lowish tolerance for giving away personal information to
people you’ve never met before, the dozens of interesting looking
links in the book do not come with URLs, and you need to register
at the web site to reach them there. This is presumably out of a reasonable
fear that they would soon be outdated, but it would be nice to
see them freely accessible from the web site instead of tucked
away behind password protection as they are.
Inevitably some of the information in the volume edition is already out of date,
you can certainly take issue with Hammond’s faith in trusting
credit card details to "secure" servers, and most of
all with his tendency to puff his own work by quoting ad nauseam
from his own earlier books on the subject. These details aside,
this book is well-worth chucking at your boss if he or she hasn’t
quite got things yet, and even for experienced
Internet users it makes a useful, if pricey, compendium.
Reviewed by Steven Kelly
