How the book was written
„The Google-Trap“ is now available in book- and online stores. The past weeks were tiring, as recent developments have kept my editor and me busy – Google is in the news almost every day. Various chapters had to be modified/updated (for example the recent Micrsoft-Yahoo! developments). But now it is done.
Once the book reaches the printing press, one has to wait patiently. The process of printing a book is by no means comparable to a newspaper or magazine that publishes your article within an afternoon or a day. A book takes considerably longer to finalize – it has to be printed, bound, packaged and shipped to both a repository and individual book-stores. The past weeks were exciting – after all, the book was a lot of hard work.
The story of the Google-Trap – I knew that I would use this title right from the beginning (but did not tell my oftentimes inquisitive interviewees) – started in the night of the 21st of March 2007. I sent Thomas Zauner, the Managing Director of the publishing company Ueberreuter, with whom I realized my previous books (including my first work “Im Visier der Datenjäger”), an email with the subject “idea”. The next morning I received the following response:
Dear Gerald, the idea sounds really fascinating! I couldn’t find a comparable book on www.buchhandel.de, even though more than 50 books showed up when searching for the keyword “Google”: a market niche! Didn’t think that we’d find something like that ;-) We have our internal non-fiction conference today: I’ll present your idea and if the others are as enthusiastic about your idea as I am, we will sign the contract tomorrow. Thank you, Thomas
That’s how it started. I got the OK the next day and we met a few days later in the cafeteria of the Kurier, negotiated (there wasn’t much to negotiate) the terms of the contract and agreed on a publication date in the spring of 2008. Three months later, I started with the necessary research, which significantly intensified in September. In total, I worked on the book for nine months, interviewing dozens of people – including Google’s Head of Research, Peter Norvig, Google-Earth and Google-Maps-boss John Hanke, Google’s Global Privacy Council, Peter Fleischer, Yahoo’s CEO, Jerry Yang, Second-Life boss Philip Rosedale, the internationally renown expert Esther Dyson and the world’s greatest search-engine expert Danny Sullivan.
Many are cited in the book, some – especially Xoogler, the term for Ex-Googler – wanted to remain anonymous.
I studied thousands of pages of research papers, statistics, publications and press releases, researched online for weeks and rented an apartment in San Francisco, USA to do some more research and interviews. Almost half of the book was written in San Francisco. It was my goal to debunk the true colors of the search engine and I believe I have successfully completed my mission.
Tags: Buch-Idee, Entstehung, Recherche
