Reverberations

From Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

Um..okay! I should be relieved now.

From this news item in Infotoday-

Citing the desire to create new revenue streams for authors, mega-publisher HarperCollins has announced the first free Web-based, ad-supported, full-text business book. Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson is now available on the author’s Web site, where an affiliate link to Amazon, not the publisher, can also be found. Not only can the book be read at the site, but it can also be searched. HarperCollins Publishers is calling the project a test of a new business model. Some self-published authors also offer ad-supported books online, but HarperCollins’ move is the first by a major publisher.

And about the revenue model and rationale behind the move-

Company spokesperson Erin Crum said: “We are exploring how online advertising programs can add value for publishers and authors. The results will be measured by the income generated through ads, number of page views and visitors to the site, and by sales of books from the site. If successful, this kind of digital product might be a new format that supplements the paperback edition.”?

Ad-supported media is here to stay. Television has shown us so far that even though advertising is overrated, it works.

There is something very human about “sarcasm”, which perhaps, the machine could never ever imitate. huhcorp has plenty of devilishly satirical site content and the dead-serious Google ads. btw, that huh chick is looking amazing.

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I have quite a backlog, as to what to read, and watch. The wishlist is growing large. I would like to read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” sometime. I am not hooked to the Star Wars series, but would like to watch Revenge of the Sith anyway, for the sake of completion of the series perhaps. Want to read something literary too, but there is a right time for everything..and I ain’t in a hurry.