Much Ado about Almost Nothing
While not pitched only at geeks, I could see myself reading Much Ado About Almost Nothing: Man's Encounter with the Electron as a precocious middle-schooler. Its 192 pages give a lot of information.
The author, Hans Camenzind, is looking for pre-publication comments and also is interested in talking to more publishers.
He's offering a free download of a pdf version of the book for a while -- I just activated a simple website so people can request the download code.
If you want to relive the geekiness of your youth (or have never left that state), go ahead and get the download of this readable history of electronics . Hans is manually reading requests to avoid too easy distribution to countries with poor copyright protections, but he'll send back the download code pretty quickly.
And, yes, this is a business-related posting. I'll cross post a cleaner version to
If you do download it and read it, let Hans (and me) know what you think!