"It's too early to write such a book," was my standard reply to colleagues who asked me when I would finally write a book on modern nonequilibrium thermodynamics. I'm afraid that this answer is still true, even today, on September 23,2004. Therefore, what you have in your hands should not be considered as a regular or final book. Rather it is the beginning of a project, the maybe premature birth of a textbook-encyclopedia-research guide chimera, a vivid vision to be materialized in forthcoming decades. The title of the project, "Beyond Equilibrium Thermodynamics," is meant to indicate that its horizon extends far beyond the well-established regimes of equilibrium and linear irreversible thermodynamics; I hope that the book-like object in your hands will actually help to shape a new paradigm of "beyond-equilibrium thermodynamics," useful to solve many existing problems and to identify even more interesting new ones, providing powerful methods and a unified language encompassing and clarifying all the competing previous formulations of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.