Public libraries have become substitute offices for the recently disenfranchised, so it wasn’t unusual that 40 bright, talented and unemployed people found themselves in a conference room on a dreary day at the Montclair Public Library last January.
It won’t be easy for publishers to overcome the Original Sin of giving away their valuable content for free. But it could be done. Theoretically.
The most logical way, as suggested prominently by David Carr in the New York Times and Walter Isaacson on the cover of Time Magazine, is some sort of micropayment system.
Last Tuesday, iTunes, Apple’s ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices.
Not long ago, someone invited me out to the Googleplex, the nickname for Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The fact is, I already live there. And it’s starting to worry me. Having grown up in the vapor trail of the ’60s, I learned to be wary of large, centralized organizations, and yet Google, a huge enterprise with a market value of $80 billion, is my ever-present wingman.
In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: Fire the most talented, experienced employees.
In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face. Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out.
Not that long ago, I needed some advice on the book business and thought to ask my friend Buzz Bissinger, the author of “Friday Night Lights” and “A Prayer for the City.” The only sticking point was, we’d never met.
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