Not
only has Evan
Schwartz '86 coined a new term —
'webonomics' — he's written a book about it.
Schwartz, a contributing writer for
Wired magazine and a former editor and reporter for
Business Week, is the author of Webonomics: Nine
Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the
World Wide Web, published in the spring of 1997 by
Broadway Books.
A computer science major and a
contributor to the Concordiensis, Schwartz wasn't very
good at writing in FORTRAN, a computer programming
language, but discovered that he could write in English
about computers — “something apparently rare in
that field,” he says.
After graduating, he took a temporary
position as a receptionist at a national computer
industry newspaper. After one day there, he suggested
that they take him on as a writer, and he immediately won
his first writing job.
He moved on to Computer Systems News
and then to Business Week, where he covered the computer
industry. Several years ago he left to freelance, and he
now writes for Wired magazine, The New York Times
business section, and other journals.
In the spring of 1995, an editor at
Wired asked Schwartz to write a story about emerging
business models of Web sites. Feeling that it was too
early to write the story because there were not enough
serious Web sites, he delayed until Netscape made a
public offering of its stock in the summer of 1995,
thereby igniting interest. The article appeared in the
spring of 1996, and Schwartz says he got so much feedback
that he decided to write a book.
“If you say 'web economy' ten
times fast, you get a new word — webonomics,” he
explains. “A lot of the old economic theories don't
apply to the Web. A real economist probably couldn't have
written this book because the web doesn't work that way.
Most economics is ruled on the basis of scarcity, but
nothing is scarce on the Web, except attention.”
Writing the book in seven months was
“a mammoth undertaking” for Schwartz, but he
felt he needed to move quickly because the Web changes so
fast. He also liked the fact that a book has “a
shelf life. It's not like articles, which seem to come
and go.”
But the thought of writing — and
selling — a book was also a frightening one. “It
was a great feeling when on my first book tour,
Webonomics jumped from number thirty-two to number three
on Amazon.com's 'hot 100.'” (The 'hot 100' is list
of the top 100 books sold by the on-line bookseller;
Webonomics spent thirty weeks on the “hot
100.”)
Now available in paperback, Webonomics
has received much attention, especially on the Internet,
and has been chosen one of the five finalists for a
Global Business Book Award. Schwartz is at work on
another book, also about the Internet. “I had to
continue to write about computers and the Internet. It's
too hard to ignore and it's too interesting,” he
concludes.
[For more information, see Schwartz's
web page at www.webonomics.com.]