Dr. Steven Weyhrich’s forthcoming Apple II history book previously announced on a2central.com, “Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life & Times of the Apple II Computer” is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Expected to ship in April 2013, the 524-page hardcover tome can be ordered now for $19.57. That’s a 55% discount from the $29.95 retail price. Run, don’t walk!

Dr. Steven Weyhrich of apple2history.org has announced, “Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life & Times of the Apple II Computer“, a book based on his extensive and meticulous research into the history of the Apple II.

…for the past year, I have been working on revisions and updates to the history, and a re-ordering of the information to be able to offer it as a book. The result is the best version of the History than I’ve ever had, and with the rising interest in retrocomputing in general, the time is opportune to produce a print book.

I am pleased to announce that I have a publisher. Variant Press (their web site is not currently working, or I’d include a link), of Winnipeg, Manitoba, has agreed to print the Apple II History as a book. Entitled Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life & Times of the Apple II Computer, the book is scheduled to be available in April 2013, running over 500 pages. It will have the text of the Apple II History as found on this web site, including some revisions not posted here, many of the pictures that appear here in the various chapters (as well as a few not found on the web site), and include a never-before-released chapter dealing specifically with KansasFest and the Apple II story in the years after Apple abandoned the platform.

Read the full text of the announcement here.

Robert Tripp, of the former MICRO INK, Inc. (now known as FlexAble Systems), has announced plans to release the long out of print Apple II title, “What’s Where in the Apple” as an eBook sometime this summer.  Tripp intends to put out more than just a scanned PDF of the popular book, however.  “It is going to be much better than anything that has gone before,” says Tripp. “We are not just scanning and posting, but rather scanning, doing optical character recognition (OCR), cleaning-up minor errors, changing to a better computer/tablet type font and reorganizing the materials to view well on most devices.  The most important — and difficult thing –  is to scan and convert the 100 pages of Atlas and Gazetteer.  Scanning is easy, however just having a ‘picture’ of the tables is not good enough.  Real tables are required that not only look better — properly formatted as columns and real characters — but can be searched.  Want to see all instances of “‘WRITE’ Command”? With the tables you simply enter the search string and all instances will be displayed!”

You can read all about his plans at this page.  Pricing and a release date have yet to be announced, but we can’t wait to see the final product.