re xyW Publications?[First list]

[OkAnnie@xxxxxxxx]

Hi, David [Rothman, the author of "XyWrite Made Easier"]: ... I'm
assuming it's OK to forward your msg [re Daniel Say's first list]
in toto to the xylist? If not, speak now or forever etc. ...   --An
nie Fisher [15 March 1995
00:30 ET]

... Thanks for asking. By all means feel free to forward the note
to the list--that was my intention. ...  --David [15 March 1995
08:31 ET]

re Daniel Say's [First list] ===================================

Thanks for forwarding the post, Annie. Hello to the Daniel and
the rest of the XyList. Lots of folks, including reviewers for PC Mag and the New York
Times, loved the "hoary story" in XyWrite Made Easier (no
literary claims made--that wasn't the goal here). But, hey, we're
all entitled, and I'm delighted to see that memories of the book live on.

If X.M.E. is not out of print, someone owes me money. The word
from Tab, at any rate, is that it is OOP. As for the laptop
book--one book, not a bunch--St. Martin's Press published it, and the name is The Complete Laptop
Computer Guide. That, too, is OOP at this point.

Alas, I haven't any decent tips to offer on locating X.M.E. at
stores. If people are patient enough to try interlibrary loans,
they might ask their librarians to contact the Fairfax County,
VA, system, which, even now, may have a few copies. What's more,
XyWriters could copy friends' X.M.E.s. As long as this is done on
a small scale and for noncommercial purposes, I'm not gonna sue.
And if someone really loves the book and wants to scan it and put
it on the World Wide Web for folks to dial up for free, hey,
maybe my vanity will triumph over business sense. The benefit of
this approach is that perhaps the .kbd files could finally be
available in electronic formats. I suspect that all the
originators of the .kbd files would be as pleased as I'd be to
see their efforts live on. Due to time, I couldn't help out, but
again,
I would be tickled to see XyWriters benefit that way as long as
the WWW posting was noncommercial.

To answer the inevitable question, I use Word for polishing, but
for original composition, XyWrite is still the fastest game
around, or at least for me. I don't spend any time tinkering with
XyWrite macros, however--hey, I worked out the basics long ago
when I was doing the book. To be exact, I'm using, gasp, a
version of Signature that happens to work much better than the
others. These days I'm into Internet books and will have two
coming out later this year. One is a look at what's happening on the Net (lots of
'tude--objective it ain't); another tells how to use computer
nets to speak out online. Best wishes to all. --David Rothman
 [14 March
1995 20:23 ET]