Extra Lives
Why Video Games Matter
Written by Tom Bissell

Format: eBook, 208 pages
On Sale: June 8, 2010
Price: $22.95

Like many otherwise functional adults, Tom Bissell is ad­dicted to video games, spending hours a day neglecting work and social engagements in favor of Oblivion, Left 4 Dead, and Grand Theft Auto IV. In Extra Lives, Bissell ex­amines the question that haunts him every time he turns off his consoles: Why... Read more >

The Hunt for Zero Point
Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology
Written by Nick Cook

Format: eBook, 304 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $14.95

This riveting work of investigative reporting and history exposes classified government projects to build gravity-defying aircraft--which have an uncanny resemblance to flying saucers.

The atomic bomb was not the only project to occupy government scientists in the 1940s. Antigravity technology, originally spearheaded by scientists in Nazi Germany, was another high priority, one... Read more >

Executioner's Current
Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
Written by Richard Moran

Format: eBook, 304 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $15.00

In this amazing story of high stakes competition between two titans, Richard Moran shows how the electric chair developed not out of the desire to be more humane but through an effort by one nineteenth-century electric company to discredit the other.

In 1882, Thomas Edison ushered in the “age of electricity”... Read more >

Small Things Considered
Why There Is No Perfect Design
Written by Henry Petroski

Format: eBook, 304 pages
On Sale: December 18, 2007
Price: $14.95

Henry Petroski, “America’s poet laureate of technology” (Kirkus Reviews)–author of The Pencil and The Evolution of Useful Things–now gives us an entertaining and perceptive study of design in everyday life, while revealing the checkered pasts, and some possible futures, of familiar objects.

Chairs, lightbulbs, cup holders, toothbrushes, doorknobs, light switches, potato peelers... Read more >

The God Machine
From Boomerangs to Black Hawks: The Story of the Helicopter
Written by James R. Chiles

Format: eBook, 368 pages
On Sale: November 26, 2008
Price: $14.00


From transforming the ways of war to offering godlike views of inaccessible spots, revolutionizing rescues worldwide, and providing some of our most-watched TV moments—including the cloud of newscopters that trailed O. J. Simpson’s Bronco—the helicopter is far more capable than early inventors expected. Now James Chiles profiles the many helicoptrians who... Read more >

Our Own Devices
How Technology Remakes Humanity
Written by Edward Tenner

Format: eBook
On Sale: August 26, 2009
Price: $15.95

From the author of Why Things Bite Back– which introduced us to the revenge antics of technology–Our Own Devices is a wonderfully revealing look at the inventions of everyday things that protect us, position us, or enhance our performance.

In helping and hurting us, these body technologies have produced consequences that... Read more >

Tomorrow Now
Envisioning the Next 50 Years
Written by Bruce Sterling

Format: eBook, 368 pages
On Sale: December 10, 2008
Price: $14.95

“Nobody knows better than Bruce Sterling how thin the membrane between science fiction and real life has become, a state he correctly depicts as both thrilling and terrifying in this frisky, literate, clear-eyed sketch of the next half-century. Like all of the most interesting futurists, Sterling isn’t just talking about machines... Read more >

The Toothpick
Technology and Culture
Written by Henry Petroski

Format: eBook, 464 pages
On Sale: November 26, 2008
Price: $15.95

A celebration culture and technology, as seen through the history of the humble yet ubiquitous toothpick, from the best-selling author of The Pencil.

From ancient Rome, where emperor Nero made his entrance into a banquet hall with a silver toothpick in his mouth, to nineteenth-century Boston, where Charles Forster, the father of... Read more >

The Playful World
How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination
Written by Mark Pesce

Format: eBook
On Sale: January 18, 2001
Price: $24.00

As you read these words, the architects of the new virtual reality are inventing a world you never imagined: call it the playful world. It's a world of interactive Web-based toys that instantly collapse the gulf between wish and existence, space and time, animate and inanimate. It's a world where the... Read more >

Ready, Set, Green
Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living
Written by Graham Hill and Meaghan O'Neill

Format: eBook
On Sale: May 20, 2008
Price: $15.00

The time to save the planet is now.

Ready? Set? Green! Living green means reversing climate change, but it also means protecting your kids and pets, improving your own health, and saving money. And it doesn’t necessarily demand a radical overhaul of your life–just some simple adjustments, such as switching to... Read more >