Spammers can be so cruel. From my inbox drops this little love letter:

Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this.. but I have a huge crush on you. I have never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was. I'm really attracted to you and I think you would be wanting to get with *Read FULL Card Here*

Then an url is given that seems to lead to a dating website, not that I am going to click on it to make sure, being too malware-adverse, though it might at least be a legitimate dating site and sexy to read, maybe including a hot little pic of a hot little lass.

I suppose we all get some of this in our e-lives, but I think this is the bet one yet. Sadly, despite not being born on the Internet last night and being familiar with Nigerian cons and such as this, my head does start spinning for a few minutes, drunk on the possibilities that this could somehow be real. (After all, there have been a few real flirtations.) It is cruel. However, if this is really you Ms. MeInterrupted, I think you're neat too!

A reminder that our e-books are not necessarily ours, but that we merely have a license to read them, even though we often pay as much for them as for the real books. Though, I thought this way before I heard of these cases in which Amazon would shut off people from their e-books. Just by virtue of my technophobia, I figured that once my Kindle breaks down I will probably be out of all the books that I have on it, because even if their is a procedure to access those books and download them again into a new Kindle, I probably would not be able to master those steps. Accordingly, I try to get only my disposable reads through my Kindle, the books that I expect I will only want to read once anyway, especially the trash-fiction.

Color me shocked! I have heard of the growing popularity of Facebook messaging, but I could not believe that it is this big a deal. You may as well have told me that Google was dying, and I would have found that more believable. Wow! I guess you really miss out on the trends when you are no longer young.

(Sourc: Sully's Dish)

The biographer of David Foster Wallace informs us that, not long before Wallace's suicide, he considered the Internet to be "the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche", going by a story he was working on, titled "Wicked", but never finished.

_ _ _

In its pages, he returns to the great theme of "Infinite Jest": the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online. The plot of "Wickedness" centers on a tabloid reporter named Skyles who, dying of cancer of the mouth, is trying to shoot pictures of Ronald Reagan beset by Alzheimer’s for the Web site Wicked.com. ... The issue of the media’s increasingly ferocious invasions of privacy was one that Wallace felt acutely after the publication of "Infinite Jest." In "Wickedness," the old tabloids—The Star, The News of the World—repulsive as they were, are depicted as playing by rules, but the new ones do not. "Despite all the hoopla about populism and information," Wallace writes of the Web, "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche." He invented for the story the sites Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, and filth.com, which will stop at nothing to publish humiliating photos of celebrities.

-- D. T. Max

_ _ _

I kind of like the nip-slips and the upskirt shots myself.

Until a couple of years ago, I also read physical books on paper, and then shifted to cheaper, easier, lighter tablet versions. Then it became a hassle to get the physical NYT delivered in Provincetown so I tried a summer of reading it on a tablet. I now read almost everything on my iPad. And as I ramble down the aisle of Amtrak's Acela, I see so many reading from tablets or laptops, with the few newspapers and physical magazines seeming almost quaint, like some giant brick of a mobile phone from the 1980s. Almost no one under 30 is reading them. One day, we'll see movies with people reading magazines and newspapers on paper and chuckle.

-- Andrew Sullivan

This is in response to Newsweek's announcement that it is going out of the print business and continuing wholly online. It saves trees and is less messy, right? Nevertheless, I still hope that books remain viable as a real item. I enjoy e-books, but one likes the option to have the thing in itself. But I do tend to be rather fetishistic.

We are familiar with the decline of newspapers in the Internet Epoch, and although we probably should not be surprised that this applies to magazines as well, I thought I'd get down this latest jeremiad on the passing away of the Age of the Printing Press:

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you put on the cover of your magazine if no one will look at you. A few weeks ago, I was in a busy doctor’s office with a dozen others, absently paging through the magazines on the table. The table in front of us was stacked with the pride of American publishing, all manner of topics and fancy covers yelling for attention. Ever the intrepid media reporter, I looked up from scanning Bon Appétit to see what other people were interested in. A mother and a daughter were locked in conversation, but everyone else was busy reading — their phones.

Though, I am not sure I see the problem if we are simply talking about a change of medium. So what if people are now reading, say, "Newsweek" magazine on their phones and computers rather than the hardcopy magazine itself?

Maybe it is the proposition that Internet ads do not generate as much revenue as when readers had to buy their own hardcopy newspapers and magazines, and people do not expect to have to pay hard money to read e-news, and too many readers will happily turn to secondary outlets if the premium sites, such as the New York Times and such, put up paywalls. That could be a problem. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for access to premium journalism, but who has money?

(Source: David Carr at The New York Times)

[T]he people who tend to not ever sign up for cable are young -- and the youth is the future. Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of the TV, found another Neilsen study. As of February 2012, for three quarters in a row, there have been declines in viewing among Americans under 35, The New York Times' Brian Stelter reports. He attributes this decline to a shift to streaming. "Young people are still watching the same shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones," he writes. Right now the cable industry has maintained stable subscription rates because of an elderly population that's watching television more, adds Stelter. But, those people won't be around to change the future. The broke twenty-somethings who survive off of Hulu, Netflix, bootleg streams of their favorite shows, and stealing each others' HBO Go passwords now, might get used to a life without paying for cable, causing a generational shift in the way Americans consume things.

-- Sully's Dish

Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy. It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.

-- Farhad Manjoo at Slate.com

I was wondering why that sales tax was popping up on my orders. I cannot say I find this news very exciting, though I like the idea of Wal-Mart taking a bath. I generally find two-day delivery to be great, but I'm an easy-going person.

Bezos decided selling books would be the best way to get big fast on the Internet. This was not immediately obvious: bookselling in the United States had always been less of a business than a calling. Profit margins were notoriously thin, and most independent stores depended on low rents. Walk-in traffic was often sporadic, the public’s taste fickle; reliance on a steady stream of bestsellers to keep the landlord at bay was not exactly a sure-fire strategy for remaining solvent.

-- Steve Wasserman, "The Amazon Effect" at The Nation

We are familiar with the way behemoths such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and, yes, Amazon have dominated the Web, but this is an account worth keeping. Maybe it is just my age, but I do think we have lost something with the near-extinction of book stores. Nevertheless, convenience and price are the king and queen of our capitalist souls. And it is nice not to have to wait around at bus stops to buy books.


_ _ _

For many of us, the notion that bricks-and-mortar bookstores might one day disappear was unthinkable. Jason Epstein put it best in Book Business, his incisive 2001 book on publishing’s past, present and future, when he offered what now looks to be, given his characteristic unsentimental sobriety, an atypical dollop of unwarranted optimism: “A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.”

That sentiment is likely to strike today’s younger readers as nostalgia bordering on fetish. Reality is elsewhere. Consider the millions who are buying those modern Aladdin’s lamps called e-readers. These magical devices, ever more beautiful and nimble in design, have only to be lightly rubbed for the genie of literature to be summoned. Appetite for these idols, especially among the young, is insatiable. For these readers, what counts is whether and how books will be made available to the greatest number of people at the cheapest possible price. Whether readers find books in bookstores or a digital device matters not at all; what matters is cost and ease of access. Walk into any Apple store (temples of the latest fad) and you’ll be engulfed by the near frenzy of folks from all walks of life who seemingly can’t wait to surrender their hard-earned dollars for the latest iPad, Apple’s tablet reader, no matter the constraints of a faltering economy. Then try to find a bookstore. Good luck. If you do, you’ll notice that fewer books are on offer, the aisles wider, customers scarce. Bookstores have lost their mojo.

[...]

Jeff Bezos got what he wanted: Amazon got big fast and is getting bigger, dwarfing all rivals. To fully appreciate the fear that is sucking the oxygen out of publishers’ suites, it is important to understand what a steamroller Amazon has become. Last year it had $48 billion in revenue, more than all six of the major American publishing conglomerates combined, with a cash reserve of $5 billion. The company is valued at nearly $100 billion and employs more than 65,000 workers (all nonunion); Bezos, according to Forbes, is the thirtieth wealthiest man in America. Amazon may be identified in the public mind with books, but the reality is that book sales account for a diminishing share of its overall business; the company is no longer principally a bookseller. Amazon is now an online Walmart, and while 50 percent of its revenues are derived from music, TV shows, movies and, yes, books, another 50 percent comes from a diverse array of products and services. In the late 1990s Bezos bought IMDb.com, the authoritative movie website. In 2009 he went gunning for bigger game, spending nearly $900 million to acquire Zappos.com, a shoe retailer. He also owns Diapers.com, a baby products website. Now he seeks to colonize high-end fashion as well. “Bezos may well be the premier technologist in America,” said Wired, “a figure who casts as big a shadow as legends like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.”

-- Steve Wasserman, "The Amazon Effect" at The Nation

</lj-spoiler

It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not on it. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention span crumbling like a Roman aqueduct. The endless favoriting and retweeting of other people’s tweets? Sounds like a digital circle jerk. Birds were born to make the repetitive, pleasant, meaningless sounds called twittering. Wasn’t the whole thing about us featherless bipeds that we could give connected intelligible sounds a cumulative sense?

-- n+1

They concede there is good news to mix with the collapsing of our civilization, such as the supposed revival of the epigram and aphoristic wit, but is there really a lot of that? Well, if the Internet were strictly for literary and scientific genius, cyberspace would be almost as empty as outer space. The real virtue, I'm sure, is that just about everyone can play. You throw in your two cents, I throw in my two cents, and pretty soon we have change for a dollar! Meanwhile, if you need to, we can imagine that we are the literary diamonds glittering in the wasteland rather than more of the scrolling chaff.