The complete process of hypermedia production, from authoring to document management and organization, is described. Structurally, the book is divided into four parts, each of which focuses on one specific issue in this complex, multifaceted task. Part 1 presents hypermedia enterprises, including hypermedia production scenarios (chapter 1) and sales and royalties (chapter 3), and it is enriched by real cases; for instance, in chapter 4, publishing corporation cases are discussed.

Part 2 focuses on producing hypermedia. This is the broadest and most detailed part, in which the different markup languages are introduced and compared, their relationships are shown, and their limitations are brought to the fore. It consists of nine chapters, with subjects ranging from a presentation of the most-used formats, especially SGML, to utilities for editing. The authors explain the editing problem by means of the dichotomy between the primary author and the secondary author and by presenting techniques for converting tagged text while preparing the textual material for hypermedia. Finally, this section briefly sketches ways to treat both visual and audio information and a way to manage hypermedia documents. It also introduces what the authors refer to as “popular multimedia applications,” although the chapter in question (chapter 12) mostly deals with Microsoft’s Multimedia Viewer. This section ends with a number of recipes for creating hypermedia documents.

Part 3 introduces hypermedia navigation and the tools that can be used to enhance it. This part consists of four chapters, which deal with graph computation (chapter 14), the graphical display of concept maps (chapter 15), rule-based navigation (chapter 16), and how to compute a path in Prolog (chapter 17).

Finally, Part 4, consisting of the last chapter, briefly describes seven hypermedia projects, which involve either incremental growth or delivery plans for hypermedia titles. A number of appendices complete the book. These seem to be the most interesting part of the book: the authors discuss their experience on a few projects.

Beyond this formal division, the book is conceptually split into two main sections. The first two parts are quite general and introductory, and seem to be intended for beginners. They are written in a simple and accessible way, without technicalities. Part 3, by contrast, is rather technical and requires a more advanced knowledge of the subject, knowledge that the first two parts of the book do not provide. Part 4 is ultimately just a brief supplement and does not go with any of the previous material.

The book is extremely useful and valuable because it puts together several issues in hypermedia editing, covering many topics and giving a holistic view of hypermedia production. Still, it does not entirely fulfill its ambitious goals. For example, Part 1, although extremely interesting in its deep analysis of the stages of hypermedia development, is sometimes too prolix and a little out of focus. The discussion is not always straightforward, and it is sometimes difficult to see its logical development. At the same time, the chapter on copyright could have been expanded, given the importance of legal issues in hypermedia production. Still, this part raises a series of interesting questions about the creation of a hypermedia product. It considers possible scenarios related to the merger of several people’s expertise in hypermedia development. More important, the authors address the question of who owns the information in the relationship between primary and secondary authors, as well as indicating some problems in information reuse.

Despite this detailed, step-by-step procedure, giving beginners a sort of manual of hypermedia development, the reader gets the feeling that something, possibly a unifying narrative, is missing. In order to cover as much as possible, too many necessary elements are left unclear and vague. Omissions include other possible applications, and problems with reusability. It is also difficult to determine the authors’ contributions to the field.