Who says no one reads books anymore? Thanks to Hard Case Crime, pulp-fiction is back with a vengance. From World War II through the 1960s, paperback crime novels were one of the fastest-selling categories in book publishing. They were paperbacks you could fit in your back pocket, with jaw-dropping cover paintings and bare-knuckled prose that grabbed you by the collar with the first sentence and held you until the …
The Big Picture Is There Is No Big Picture
Lincoln Journal Star: The mass audience in the United States is splintering and dividing into ever more specialized and personalized niches. In the 1940s, more than half of all Americans went to the movies at least once week. In the ’50s and ’60s, the most popular television shows were seen in more than half the households in the country. Today, despite unceasing hype and advertising, an average week sees around 10 …
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$.99 A Song Leads To $.99 A Show
USA Today: CBS and NBC delivered another hammer blow to the traditional TV economic model on Monday by agreeing to let some Comcast and DirecTV customers pay 99 cents to watch certain hit shows on demand and ad-free. Viacom's CBS struck a deal with Comcast that will make new episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, NCIS, Survivor and The Amazing Race available to viewers who subscribe to its extra-cost digital …
Those Pesky File Sharers
The New York Times: Grokster, a developer of file-swapping software used to trade copyrighted music and movie files, said Monday that it would halt distribution of the software and cut off support for its associated network as part of a landmark settlement with the recording industry and Hollywood studios. The pact comes four months after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Grokster could be held liable for …
Google Is Not The Enemy
Marc E. Babej counters Scott Donaton's rant on Google, and the need for media agencies to "stop complaining and start competing." Media agency complacency is neither here nor there, and it’s not the issue. Donaton misses the larger point - that Google is out of any media agency’s league, for three reasons. First, as the owner of one of the most comprehensive repositories of behavioral and contextual data in …
Amazon To Sell Chapters Like iTunes Sells Songs
Through a service called Amazon Pages, Amazon will allow people to "inexpensively" buy chapters from a book and read them online. Customers will get complete online access to the book through another service called Amazon Upgrade. Both services are an extension of Amazon's existing search within a book program. "Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon's existing Search Inside the Book technology to give …
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All Text-Based Work Is Interactive
Kurt Vonnegut in Forbes: What I do, which is becoming more and more impractical I think, is make people respond to idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page. And there was a time when this was a form of home entertainment, and so it was worthwhile for people to learn how to read. But reading it is actually quite difficult--I mean it is as hard as learning …
The High Price Of Online Content
Media Post: Led by a surge in entertainment spending, U.S. consumers shelled out $987 million for online content during the first half of this year, marking a 16 percent increase from the first half of 2004, according to a report issued Monday by the Online Publishers Association. Spending at entertainment and lifestyle soared by about 45 percent to $265 million in the first half of this year, from $183 million in …
