MediaFlect

Sounds like pants some powerful women would wear, perhaps, but is a fascinating relatively new feature from Amazon.com (seems to have appeared in the last month or so). Buy works of, say, a couple or few dozen pages, pay 49 cents, and get the right to read them forever, even print them out from your “digital Locker in PDF, HTML, and text e-mail formats.”

Let’s call it the iTunes model brought to books. Wonder when we’ll see books sold a chapter or section at a time. Serialization for the modern era.

More on Disney War by James Stewart: I’m taken by how the nonsense that apparently went on behind closed doors there, among executives earning milllions and managing billions, is so similar to the nonsense I’ve dealt with at many fewer zeroes and much smaller staff levels.

Jealousies, denials things were said, deft or cloddish management of people and their personalities, heavy-handed egos, ego-stroking, people seeming to “lose their soul” as they associate themselves with new bosses.

This is one case when I can’t link because the material I’m taking about isn’t available online. Not even paid. you can buy a digital edition for about $10, a lot less than the $19 or so for print.
You can see in this excerpt how little Michael Eisner seemed to know about his new company or job when he assumed the mantle of chief and chairman in 1984.

RR Bowker, essentially the official database agency of books (they assign ISBN numbers), has released this press release in which they herald the fact that the number of books published in 2004 was up 14% to some 195,000 titles, upending three years of flatness.

The obvious observation is that the spread of new media, Google highlighting scholarly titles and the like has not cut out the hunger for book publishing. But a figure that jumped out at me was that, while the number of adult fiction books led the trend (up 43%), the number of poetry and drama books was right behind at more than 40%. Poetry? Drama? Really? Why, I wonder? Do the sales justify the push?

They didn’t give a figure for celebrity-published children’s fiction, but I bet that Madonna, Jay Leno and Jason Alexander among others (why why why do celebs feel the need to write kids’ books?) have helped push that category up a notch, too.

Reading James B. Stewart’s “Disney War,” struck by how much of the first part of the book, in which former CEO Michael Eisner and other top execcs spend their time visiting other top execs at their homes, for dinners, etc. I know it’s a schmooze-fest, and it’s all Hollywoooood, but it’s fascinating to me how even in this electronic age, the execs spend so much time doing one-to-one human relations. Now there’s a problem for media to solve.