Thanks for your response. Your input as a Prospective Customer (our version of the Voice of Authority) is quite appreciated.

I take your point (and the point of many others who have commented) about the heavy focus on sites in America and the UK. But after all, the book is written in English and primarily publishing in those countries (Canada, mea culpa; we promise to do better by you in the next edition). A European edition is a great suggestion, and I would love to see it happen, although it would probably come from another author/publisher pair. Unfortunately, the realities of the European book market and the amount of work it takes to create a book like this mean it would not likely be a profitable investment of resources for us. I wish we didn't have to take such things into account, but we do.

Still, whether or not you are totally satisfied with our selections, we hope you enjoy reading the book as published and are able to learn something new -- about places nearby wherever you live, diversions for an afternoon on business travel, or destinations for family vacations, not to mention the really fascinating principles and discoveries behind those places. And by all means, suggestions for even more great places to go are more than welcome.

As the editor for this book, I can tell you we had quite a few conversations about what type of places to include -- there are certainly a lot more than 128 to choose from! (Hello, sequel?)

While it's true that the book includes a certain number of museums, I can assure you they are each remarkable in some way. For example, the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, contains a complete 19th-century fishing boat with a large slice through the side that enables visitors to see into the boat from the top deck to the keel. The museum's bridge-building room features a full-scale suspension bridge that visitors can walk over. Trust me, none of the museums included is your typical local science museum with a couple of meteorites and a Van de Graaff generator.

The Nördlinger Ries crater is pretty awesome, but we were trying to capture places with more to do than look at a hole-in-the-ground (even if it *is* a really awesome, totally geeky hole-in-the-ground).

More info on the sites in the book, including photos and video, can be found here: http://geekatlas.ning.com/ Enjoy!

Secondly, the serif font selected (whose name does not seem to be identified in the book -- a common practice ages ago) has quite thin curves, which arguably does make the font face more stylish, but diminishes readability.

This information can be found in the back of all O'Reilly books in the Colophon section (along with information about the animal on the cover :) ). For Using Drupal, "The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSansMonoCondensed."