New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation by Thomas Dyja

Author:Thomas Dyja [Dyja, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982149802
Google: HC7uDwAAQBAJ
Published: 2021-03-16T13:07:15+00:00

A Victorian Lady Who’d Stepped in Dog Poop

The Media Industry tended to process the Internet with nervous, patronizing references to “geek chic” while deciding whether to shift lunch from 44 at the Royalton Hotel to the suddenly hotter Michael’s. “[T]o be Infobahn-hip…,” advised USA Today, “you have to have your electronic mail address on your business card.” The Times ventured a tentative foray online with AOL in 1994, though, wrote Jon Katz, it “seemed embarrassed and slightly disgusted with itself, like a Victorian lady who’d stepped in dog poop.” The supposedly democratic, even anarchic, qualities of the Internet that would allow anyone to put anything out there whenever they wanted, came at a nervous time as Boomers brought their teenaged tastes with them into adulthood, fearlessly wearing Disney apparel while relegating the Fine Arts to a quiet corner with a cup of tea. Even jazz had aged out and Japanese tourists now filled the seats at venerable clubs.

Old book publishing hands would say their business model had always been illogical, but “even though we knew the change was coming,” says Joni Evans, “… we did it the old way.” Nicholas Negroponte, the head of MIT’s Media Lab, predicted that bound books would become a thing of the past as soon as “electronic paper” hit the market. Novelist Robert Coover hosted an “online writing space,” and publishers, editors, and authors sat through a Microsoft presentation at the New York Public Library about the future of multimedia. No one could say yet whether the Internet would be an experiment or a replacement. Email was on the way to becoming a part of daily life. All this added up to a growing fear that literature was becoming a luxury item. Esteemed editors like Jason Epstein and Gordon Lish retired, Dick Snyder was fired, and by the end of the ’90s the consolidating urge that created Time Warner reduced a once-thriving ecosystem of nearly a hundred publishers in the late ’70s into less than a dozen behemoths: HarperCollins took Morrow; Penguin took Putnam’s; S&S bought Macmillan, which included Scribner’s and Atheneum. Random House was in the hands of Harry Evans, deft at promotion but overheard the day after the National Book Awards grousing about “That poet” who “went on and on. Jacklyn…” A friend corrected him; her name was Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn Brooks.

Oprah came to the rescue. In September 1996, she announced a new monthly Book Club. “I want to get the whole country reading again,” she said. Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean immediately became a bestseller and going forward, selection became tantamount to winning the lottery for each lucky author. Evans left in 1997 for US News and World Report, and a year later German media conglomerate Bertelsmann took Random House off Si’s hands. On the retail side, Barnes & Noble chief Len Riggio saw an almost spiritual promise in his superstores—“a chain becomes a network,” he said, “so that people who participate in Barnes & Noble activities, which include shopping, feel something in common with people in faraway places who share the same activities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.