This anthology of 20 articles on the emergence of electronic commerce by 26 distinguished scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs extends an earlier work, The Digital Economy, and examines the meaning of doing business in the electronic marketplace. The inquiry is provocative, taking the issues of the earlier work into the world of virtual firms made up of units co-operating on the Internet. The editors and many contributors whose roots are Canadian add a friendly perspective to American concerns with national security.

The old rules of virtual integration of companies are passé and, as new ways of competing arise, new forms of organization and governance are needed. Authors like IBM strategist Bruce Harreld introduce new values, explaining that it is speed that drives the digital economy. Why companies like Yahoo and Amazon.com thrive is examined by University of Toronto professor Paul Woolner. Bank of Montreal technoczar Lloyd Darlington rethinks the shape of financial services. There are inquiries into digital photography and digitally enhanced conventional photography.

Some of Blueprint’s predictions are already taking place. Northern Telecom president John Roth says that in the business of moving information, distance is dying in terms of cost and transmission speed. In 1915, he says, a weekday, coast-to-coast, three-minute long distance call during peak hours was $20.70. Today, the same call costs as little as a dime – the wholesale price is no more than a penny. High speed fibre optic cables exist that can transmit the entire contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in 20 seconds.

Read quickly, much of Blueprint is woolly futurism. Pondered slowly, the content gains importance, for the Internet is spreading knowledge outward and power downward faster than perhaps any other development in history. Blueprint is a guide to this future. It is likely to be consulted and quoted widely, a book that can be read in chunks but deserves to be savoured by information technologists and by anyone whose life is driven by computers.