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Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner
By: Alec Klein
List Price: $15.00
Amazon Price: $6.00

Product Description
In January 2000, America Online and Time Warner announced the largest merger in U.S. history, a deal that would create the biggest media company in the world. It was celebrated as the marriage of new media and old media, a potent combination of the nation's No. 1 Internet company and the country's leading entertainment giant, the owner of such internationally renowned brands as Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, and Time magazine.

But only three years later, nearly all the top executives behind the merger had resigned, the company had lost tens of billions of dollars in market value, and the U.S. government had begun two investigations into its business dealings.

How did the deal of the century become an epic disaster?

Alec Klein has covered AOL Time Warner for The Washington Post since the merger. His reporting on the company led to investigations by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Stealing Time, he takes readers behind the scenes to show how a clash of cultures set the stage for a spectacular corporate collapse. AOL's Steve Case knew it was only a matter of time before the Internet bubble of the late 1990s would burst, grounding his high-flying company. His solution: Buy another company to keep his own aloft. Meanwhile, Time Warner's Jerry Levin was enamored of new technology but frustrated by his inability to push his far-flung media empire into the Internet age. AOL and Time Warner seemed like a perfect match.

But the government forced the two companies to make concessions, and during the yearlong negotiations technology stocks tumbled. AOL executives lorded it over their Time Warner counterparts, who felt they were being acquired by brash, young interlopers with inflated dollars. The AOL way was fast, loose, and aggressive, and Time Warner executives -- schooled in more genteel business practices -- rebelled. In the midst of clashing cultures and conflicting management styles, AOL's business slowed and then stalled. Worse yet, AOL came under government scrutiny, and when the company conducted its own internal investigation, it admitted that it had improperly booked at least $190 million in revenue. The Time Warner rebellion gathered momentum.

This is a riveting story of ambition, hubris, and greed set amid the boom-and-bust years of the technology bubble. It is filled with outsized personalities -- Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman, Ted Turner, and many more. Based on hundreds of confidential company documents and interviews with key players in this unfolding drama, Stealing Time is a fascinating tale of the swift rise and even swifter fall of AOL Time Warner.

AOL for Dummies
By: John Kaufeld
List Price: $24.99
Amazon Price: $0.68

Product Description
* A traditional bestseller, AOL For Dummies is the only regularly updated reference book on the market for beginning AOL users
* Covers the essentials of signing up for AOL, getting around the AOL channels, using AOL's e-mail and instant messaging, and exploring the Web browser
* Helps first-time users take advantage of AOL's broadband content and the newest features of AOL 9.0 Optimized, such as improved safety features, e-mail systems, and on-demand programming
* Highlights the changes that users of previous versions will encounter with AOL 9.0
* Includes coverage of new high-speed services

AOL Simplified 3rd Edition
By: Ruth Maran
List Price: $24.99
Amazon Price: $24.90

Product Description
Four-color with large screenshots and a friendly disk character, America Online Simplified 3E shows readers new to AOL the ins and outs of one of the world's most popular ISPs.

Covers the most popular features of AOL, including e-mail, instant messaging and the Buddy List(r) feature, My Calendar, the AOL Media Player, the "You've Got Pictures"(sm) service, Radio AOL, AOL Shop, and the AOL Box Office.

My Life at AOL
By: Julia L. Wilkinson
List Price: $13.98
Amazon Price: $8.60

Product Description
We see stories everywhere these days about the ?instant millionaires? the Internet industry created. But nowhere is there a first-person true-life account of what it was like to be an employee of the company at the epicenter of the world of interactive communications from the very early days.

Through the eyes of an industry insider, who programmed AOL?s hugely popular ?People Connection? chat area, the reader learns how the lives of many people changed dramatically in a few short years.

As we follow the author?s ?I was there? account of being hired at Quantum Computer Services (which became AOL) in 1988, and navigating this strange new world, the reader gets the ?true inside story? of AOL?s eccentric founding father, Bill von Meister, and how Steve Case was really hired. Through interviews with numerous AOL employees, industry pundits, and users themselves, we explore the world of online community and how it has affected people?s lives.

My Life at AOL strives to give a balanced account of the world online. Although the book touches on some of the most egregious online cases of cyber crime and intrigue, it sheds light on the many benefits of this new medium as well. The reader will come away with a sense of the history and impact of the Internet revolution as seen from a personal perspective. (And hopefully chuckle at a few crazy anecdotes).

There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Q...
By: Kara Swisher
List Price: $14.95
Amazon Price: $7.73

Product Description
?AOL had found itself at the edge of disaster so frequently that one of its first executives, a brassy Vietnam veteran and restaurateur named Jim Kimsey, had taken the punch line of an old joke popularized by Ronald Reagan and made it into an unlikely mantra for the company. It concerned a very optimistic young boy who happened upon a huge pile of horse manure and began digging excitedly. When someone asked him what he was doing covered in muck, the foolish boy answered brightly, ?There must be a pony in here somewhere!?? ?From the Prologue

If you?re wondering what happened after ?a company without assets acquired a company without a clue,? as Kara Swisher wryly writes, it?s time to crack open this trenchant book about the doomed merger of America Online and Time Warner. On a quest to discover how the deal of the century became the messiest merger in history, Swisher delivers a rollicking narrative and a keen analysis of this debacle that is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it all means for the digital future. Packed with new revelations and on-the-record interviews with key players, it is the first detailed examination of the merger?s aftermath and also looks forward to what is coming next.

It certainly has not been a pretty picture so far?with $100 billion in losses, a sinking stock price, employees in revolt, and lawsuits galore. As Swisher writes, ?It is hard not to feel a bit queasy about the whole sorry mess...It felt a bit like I was watching someone fall down a flight of stairs in slow motion, and every bump and thump made me wince. It made me reassess old ideas and wonder what I had gotten wrong. And it left me deeply confused as to what had happened and, more important, what was coming next.?

For Swisher, finding the answers to what went awry is important because she remains a staunch believer in the digital future?maybe not in the AOL Time Warner merger, but in the essential idea at the heart of it that someday the distinction of old and new media will no longer exist. Borrowing from Winston Churchill, Swisher calls it ?the end of the beginning? of the digital revolution. ?By that, I mean that it is from the ashes of this bust that the really important companies of the next era will emerge. And that evolution will, I believe, be shaped by what happened?and what is happening now?at AOL Time Warner.?

To figure it all out, Swisher takes her reader on a journey that begins with a portrait of two wildly different corporate cultures and businesses that somehow came to believe, in the crucible of the red-hot Internet era, that they could successfully join forces and achieve unprecedented growth and success. When the merger was announced in early 2000, the irresistible combination was hailed as the new paradigm and its executives?Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman?as popular icons of the future. But after the boom so spectacularly turned to bust and the visions of New Media Supremacy lay in ruins, Swisher searches for clues about where the merger went wrong and who is to blame.

More important, she looks to the future of both AOL Time Warner and the Internet as she seeks to answer the key question that the noise of the disaster has all but drowned out. Will the demise of the AOL Time Warner merger be the final and inevitable chapter of the dot-com debacle or will it herald a new paradigm altogether? This book, then, is a primer for the time to come, using the story of the AOL Time Warner merger as the vehicle to show the troubled journey into the future.

?Swisher narrates human foible and brilliance, a train-wreck tale brightened by plenty of personality?including her own, sparkling through in laugh-out-loud observations on almost every page.? ?Boston Globe

?Swisher displays a finely honed hogwash detector and maps AOL?s inevitable fall with the perfect amount of cynicism and whimsy.? ?Newsday

?Swisher delivers a readable account of the gigantic merger and why it didn?t work. She mixes in distinctive humor with hard-core reporting to expose a monumental exercise in ineptness.??Dallas Morning News

?[Readers] will be entertained by Swisher?s barbed wit and carried along by her expertly constructed narrative.? ?Forbes.com

?Swisher moves her narrative along swiftly and adopts a pleasingly irreverent tone...Better yet, Swisher diligently reconstructs the optimism with which many Time Warner officials (including Ted Turner) greeted the merger. The merger was not a total loss...Swisher has produced an enjoyable book about it.? ?Washington Post

?Swisher explains in her excellent new book why the merger turned out to be a rotten egg...Pony is a wickedly funny, insider-y tale...Swisher deftly paints the characters of the top executives, then exposes all the bickering and backstabbing.? ?San Francisco Weekly

?Swisher has a wicked sense of humor and a keen eye for human foibles and folly.? ?Chicago Sun-Times

?[An] entertaining and sharply written analysis of the fateful AOL Time Warner merger.? ?Variety.com

• Goodbye, Compuserve
After 30 years, Compuserve has decided to shut down. Not the whole thing, though, as Compuserve 2000 will still be around. Still, this marks the end of an era. Compuserve started as a dial up service in 1969. That is long before the Internet and World Wide Web were even thought of. In the 80?s it changed hands and became the biggest information and Networking services in the world. They were the first to offer Internet access (in limited fashion) via dial up. Here is the official email to cus • JoJo How To Touch a Girl mp4
JoJo On AOL Session Singing How to touch a Girl,,Amazing Voice :D • A Little Internet History and a New DVD Site
Three quick links for your holiday weekend before I go back to reviewing manga: 1. DVDsWorthWatching.com has just gone live. This site is a sister to ComicsWorthReading.com and MangaWorthReading.com ? but I think I should stop with three for a while. 2. CompuServe is dead , which makes me feel old and sad. That was the first commercial service with an outstanding comic presence, including much valuable professional participation, and the general level of discourse was very high (bec • The Inevitable Anti-U.S. Backlash Has Started On Kiva
When we reported on Kiva.org?s decision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded?lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited. It looks like Shah?s prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva?s c • And Yes, In Fact, While We?re On the Subject of ?The Big Three?
Dear Asimov?s, Analog , and F&SF: Please be aware that here in 2009, you look absolutely foolish for not accepting electronic submissions. We are a decade into the 21st century now. You really have had more than enough time to accept the fact that almost all correspondence and transmission of documents has become an electronic affair, and to create a system that allows you to process and respond to such submissions in an efficient and timely manner. A list of complaints like this ,

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