As I’ve noted on several other occasions, and will continue to note in the future, at times there is a disconnect between the publishing industry’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric about protecting the cultural soul of our nation (or any nation for that matter), and its omnipresent and often low-brow efforts to exploit that cultural stewardship for cash. (See also: hypocrisy.)
Here are two quotes from a blog comment I wrote today:
Marketing will always be trying to leverage content for its own ends because it’s in marketing’s best interest to do so.
…
Maybe in a decade (or two months), when you click a button on your e-reader to look at the next page of your novel, you[‘ll] instead get an interstitial commercial which you cannot bypass.
Before you roll your eyes at this bold prediction — and I say now that some e-reader marketing weasel will implement exactly this type of marketing fail — a brief history lesson is in order. Back in the 70’s, when I was just getting into paperback fiction, I happened to run across a novel that had a card of some kind wedged in the middle of it. Thinking that someone had left a substantial bookmark behind I flipped to the card and attempted to remove it, only to discover that it was bound to the book. [ Read more ]