Esri Press will publish Fun With GPS: Understanding the Ninth Utility in fall 2004. Aimed at the rapidly expanding market for recreational users of GPS, the book is the result of author Don Cooke's decades-long professional involvement and personal fascination with electronic navigation and digital mapping. The book's main premise is that to fully understand and effectively use "the ninth utility" (water, sewer, electricity, gas, telephone, television, radio, and waste removal being the other eight), raw GPS data needs to be mapped—and that mapping happens to be, or at least can be, fun.

Describing mapping projects as varied in scope as wild animal rehabilitation, snowmobile expeditions, cross-country skiing, speedskating, dogsled tracking, train spotting, stock car racing, lawn care at fabled Fenway Park, windsurfing, hang gliding, kite flying, treasure hunting, and several others, Cooke takes the centerpiece of what was until very recently a top secret, military-use-only technology (employing atomic clocks and radio transmitters built into satellites) and brings it literally into our backyards.

GPS technology, according to Esri President Jack Dangermond, "is both powerful and empowering and crucial to the viability of long-term survival of endangered species and the wise use of resources to sustain life on earth." And this Department of Defense super technology, which can locate any object, spatial-temporal series of objects, or feature of terrain anywhere on the surface of the planet with an accuracy of under one meter, is available to anyone with approximately $100 and two double-A batteries.

Unlocking the secrets of GPS by simply making it fun, Cooke points the way for individuals and communities to begin to use GPS and GIS to better understand the world they see and use every day.

Don Cooke is the founder of Geographic Data Technology, Inc. (GDT), an Esri Business Partner and the largest supplier of digital mapping data sets, and was one of the visionaries and key contractors responsible for the creation of the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) database of the United States Census Bureau.