A fair review, but as has been pointed out already, this book isn't aimed at us at all. This is for the folks who want spiffy pictures and glassy explanations without going deep into the treknology we all love. This is for the teenager who's been watching reruns on Spike, or who's been catching up with Trek fiction (also available from Pocket Books!), or who's been gaming away with STO, and wants something to go with that tidy meal. That fan can't find the TNG TM in the average bookstore, and he can't be troubled to dig too deep at the used book shop or for meticulously and not-legally scanned versions online (to say nothing of the sheer volume of fan-produced trek tech sites out there).
And even THEN, the market for pure-geek stuff like this ain't what it used to be. I was helping to produce content for Mojo's "Unseen Frontier" art book at the top of this decade, which was supposed to be an in-universe book of cool starship photos as though they'd been holographed by people standing at a starship's window or looking up into the sky (this project ultimately morphed into the Starship Spotter and the first SOTL calendars). When it was cancelled, it was simply because that sort of book doesn't sell well. Same reason that there was never any Voyager or ENT manual, or even one for the newest movie. They just don't sell well, in this world of online satisfaction and where hundreds of talented fans can download all they need without leaving their homes. Pocket sells fiction enough to justify what it prints (and even then it's a shadow of Trek in the pre-Internet years).
As such, I'm convinced that this is likely the best we'll have for a while, and that the Haynes angle was the "hook" the writers used to pitch the book in the first place. If it were a straightforward tech manual, it wouldn't have been printed. With a Haynes gimmick, it becomes a curiosity and something which casual fans might pick up enough to justify the print run. And as such, it's aimed at the casual (enough) fan who likes the pretty enough pictures and won't know that the shuttlepod graphic is a copy of the Adobe file that's been sitting on a ZIP disk in Mike or Rick's attic for years now. We get flashes of insight and a few neat fake-toids written by the same kinds of fans we are, but nothing as substantial as there used to be because frankly, the cost-benefit ratio of going that deep to sell this sort of book doesn't exist.
Mark
