3 Ideas for books I won't get to write

Had a great dinner in the city last night with the three agents of Citizen Agency and my friend and imminent neighbor, Jeremiah. We had decided to get together to discuss communities a subject where we share a good deal of passion. We hardly grazed the topic, but we had a Hell of a time talking about a good range of topics.

At one point, I got into one of my insufferable soliliquys about what will not be going into Global Neighbo[u]rhoods. Almost anyone who has been through the process understands that as you drill into any particular topic, it gets bigger and bigger. This directly conflicts with some of the advice the good folk at Wiley gave me as publishers for the last book: write something that can be read from cover-to-cover on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. That comes out to about 80,000 words.

So part of the TOC struggle of the past week or two has been to decide what nt to write about. The following topics either just won't fit in, or they are so big, that they deserve a book of their own. If you are thinking of writing a book, I will be glad to tell you why I think these are good topics that I will mention but not probe in the upcoming book.

• Asia. I had originally planned to visit China, India, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and perhaps Singapore and Indonesia with Canadian VC Rick Segal. The trip did not work out.  When Rick and I toured eight European countries, I walked away with too much material for one book.  Asia is a much vaster story and someone should dig in to what is going on in social media over there.
• Digital Divide. As social media and just plain old Internet connection are poised to not just bring more people rapidly into a modern world, but it is going to open markets that were never there before.  Maybe. Maybe not.  But there is a dramatic story there and I am not going to be telling very much of it in this book.
• The Global Start Up. It is amazing where companies are popping because of the Internet. I think, I have heard about really interesting entrepreneurial efforts in 35 countries, all of them using the Internet for marketing, sales, distribution, recruiting, collaboration, exploiting available open source materials, research. I almost wrote this book, but I like the one I picked even better.

Comments

[Heather]

Shel,

I think it's a shame that you won't be dealing much with the digital divide. I see it as an issue that is being forgotten about. I read Naked Conversations and thought it was great, but then I thought a bit about what I think was the 1936 US presidential election. A telephone poll was conducted and showed that Roosevelt would lose. Of course, many people who could not afford telephones at that time voted for Roosevelt. We're seeing a bit of this again with so many young voters only having cell phones.

The digital divide may keep businesses and other organizations from truly knowing what their customers/constituents think since they won't be reaching all of them. I'm involved the field of distance education and the digital divide weighs on me with each course I develop.

[Scott Hughes]

It's a shame you won't get to write those books. They sound interesting.

Thanks,
Scott Hughes
Book & Reading Forums

[shel israel]

Scott,
My hope is that someone else will write them. They deserve to be written. By the time I am done with Global Neighbourhoods, it will be too late for me.