Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour?

The world, as Nick Bilton—with tongue-in-cheek—shows, has been going to hell for a long, long time, and what we are experiencing is the twenty-first-century version of the fear that always takes hold as new technology replaces the old. In fact, as Bilton shows, the digital era we are part of is, in all its creative and disruptive forms, the foundation for exciting and engaging experiences not only for business but society as well.

Both visionary and practical, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works captures the zeitgeist of an emerging age, providing the understanding of how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior:

   • With a walk on the wild side—through the porn industry—we see how this business model is leading the way, adapting product to consumer needs and preferences and beating piracy.
   • By understanding how the Internet is creating a new type of consumer, the “consumnivore,” living in a world where immediacy trumps quality and quantity, we see who is dictating the type of content being created.
   • Through exploring the way our brains are adapting, we gain a new understanding of the positive effect of new media narratives on thinking and action. One fascinating study, for example, shows that surgeons who play video games are more skillful than their nonplaying counterparts.
   • Why social networks, the openness of the Internet, and handy new gadgets are not just vehicles for telling the world what you had for breakfast but are becoming the foundation for “anchoring communities” that tame information overload and help determine what news and information to trust and consume and what to ignore.
   • Why the map of tomorrow is centered on “Me,” and why that simple fact means a totally new approach to the way media companies shape content.
   • Why people pay for experiences, not content; and why great storytelling and extended relationships will prevail and enable businesses to engage with customers in new ways that go beyond merely selling information, instead creating unique and meaningful experiences.
 
I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works walks its own talk by creating a unique reader experience: Semacodes embedded in both print and eBook versions will take readers directly to Bilton’s website (www.NickBilton.com), where they can access videos of the author further developing his point of view and also delve into the research that was key to shaping the central ideas of the book. The website will also offer links to related content and the ability to comment on a chapter, allowing the reader to join the conversation.


From the Hardcover edition.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it
 
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.
 
It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
 
The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.

Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.

A few years ago, MySpace.com was just an idea kicking around a Southern California spam mill. Scroll down to the present day and MySpace is one of the most visited Internet destinations in America, displaying more than 40 billion webpage views per month and generating nearly $1 billion annually for Rupert Murdoch’s online empire. Even by the standards of the Internet age, the MySpace saga is an astounding growth story, which climaxed with the site’s acquisition by Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005 for a sum approaching one billion dollars. But more than that, it may be the defining drama of the digital era.

In Stealing MySpace, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Angwin chronicles the rise of this Internet powerhouse. With an unerring eye, Angwin details how MySpace took the Internet by storm by grabbing the best ideas from around the Web, encouraging pinup stars such as Tila Tequila to make their home on its pages and giving everyone freedom to experiment with online identities–including using somebody else’s identity.

Stealing MySpace introduces us to the site’s founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who dabbled in computer hacking, online pornography, spam, and spyware before starting MySpace. Although their street savvy, doggedness, and clubbing skills far eclipsed their tech prowess, they stumbled their way to success and soon found themselves at ground zero of a high-stakes war that pitted Rupert Murdoch against his frequent nemesis, the combative Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone. Angwin sheds light on the dizzying backroom deals that allowed Murdoch to snatch MySpace from Viacom’s grasp even as the MySpace founders remained in the dark about their own fate. Then she takes us inside the Murdoch empire as DeWolfe and Anderson lobby furiously to regain control of their creation.

Venturing beyond the business aspects of the story, Angwin also explores the Internet culture, a voyeuristic world in which MySpace must stay one step ahead of amateur pornographers, sexual predators, and “spoofers” who set up fake profiles (Rupert Murdoch himself tolerates dozens of phony “Ruperts” on the site) and cope with the general excesses and sometimes illegal acts of a community of account holders equal in number to the population of Japan.

In Stealing MySpace, Julia Angwin dishes on the epic real-world battle for control of a virtual empire. In a savvy, smart, fast-paced narrative reminiscent of Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate and Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing, Stealing MySpace tells is the whole gripping story behind a breakout cultural phenomenon.


From the Hardcover edition.

A colourful and revealing look at more than 500 years of commerce conducted at the renowned Frankfurt Book Fair, from its beginnings in the Middle Ages. Even then, in spite of internal strife and religious upheaval, books were becoming increasingly accessible to those who found their way to Frankfurt to buy, sell, and promote. The fact that King Henry VIII sent Sir Thomas Bodley as his personal emissary to purchase books for the new library at Oxford University is an indication of the Fair's growing importance outside Germany.

Through the ensuing centuries, the fortunes of the Fair waxed and waned; however, the period following the Second World War brought with it a new spirit of renewal that has yet to lose momentum. In recent years, increasing number of international book fairs have taken the Frankfurt model, and each is finding its own way to further enrich the world of books everywhere.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for our own age, the story of a dreamer who turned American media upside down—and suffered the consequences


Louis Rossetto had no money, no home, no job. Five years later he owned the hottest magazine in America and was poised to become an international tycoon, with America’s most powerful financiers by his side.

Rossetto was the founder and editor of Wired, whose hyperactive Day-Glo pages proclaimed that every American institution was obsolete. Instantly, Wired, was everywhere—on television, passed around the halls of Congress, displayed in the office of the president of the United States. Wired,’s headquarters in San Francisco became a pilgrimage site for everybody who wanted to be at the white-hot center of the digital revolution. Not since the early days of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone had anybody so brilliantly channeled the enthusiasms of his era.

But this was only the beginning. Wired cast an uncanny spell, creating a feedback loop that grew stunningly out of control. Wired,’s online site, HotWired, designed and sold the first banner advertisements for the World Wide Web, unleashing a commercial frenzy. Wired, reached for empire, with a book-publishing company, a broadcast division, and foreign editions all over the globe. But as the market’s enthusiasm outstripped the limits of reason, Rossetto faced a battle over the fate of Wired that would prove the ultimate test of his radical ideas.

Gary Wolf, one of Wired,’s most popular writers, takes no prisoners in this insider’s account, telling a story that is alternately thrilling, hilarious, heartbreaking, and absurd. Now that bumper stickers read-ing please god–just one more bubble have been sighted on the highways of California, Wired—A Romance goes beyond the dot.com clichés and paints a deeply affecting portrait of the boom.


From the Hardcover edition.

"The challenge is, how do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up?" This was Sam Zell's unique way of saying hello to a large gathering at the Los Angeles Times shortly after taking charge of Tribune Company. "I'm your Viagra, OK?"

Even for Sam Zell, one of the greatest contrarian investors, buying Tribune Company was a risky and controversial move. Many saw the purchase of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times by a man who had made his fortune in cargo containers, real estate, fertilizer, and plumbing to be a sign of the coming media apocalypse. Maybe they were frightened by Zell's nickname, "the Grave Dancer."

The move didn't seem to make sense for Zell either. Why would an epithet-slinging, motorcycle-riding scrapper-who had started with nothing and worked his way up to a $5 billion real estate fortune-be interested in a declining media company (it would have been another story if Zell had taken over Playboy, issues of which Zell had bought and resold for profit to friends around town when he was a teenager)?

Ben Johnson has the answers in this fascinating biography of a uniquely colorful mogul, who is fond of blunt declarations and bold business moves. Johnson also tells the real story of Zell's adventure at the Tribune, that feverish year between his purchase of the ailing company and its declaration of bankruptcy.

Between the story of Zell's rise to astounding riches and previously untold details of his conflicts with his employees and investors, Money Talks, Bullsh*t Walks will keep readers alternately laughing and on the edge of their seats.

The Quotable Sam Zell
"If you're the biggest kid on the block, you can throw your weight around. Of course, I never was the big kid, but I've made up for it over the years."

"The true test of an entrepreneur is someone who spends his life constantly testing his limits. The definition of an idiot is someone who has reached their goals."

"I don't do business with anybody who's not afraid, and I won't hire anybody who is confident to the point where fear is not very close to the surface. I've often said that fear and courage are cousins and very closely related."

"Extremism in the pursuit of opportunity is not a vice. If you've seen me step over the edge, it's only to get you to take a few steps toward the line."

"The eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not take oneself seriously."

"The best thing to have in the world is a monopoly, and if you can't have a monopoly, you want an oligopoly. I'm more than willing to leave all the rest of the highly competitive world to everybody else."

"To create an enormously successful corporation that provides both opportunity and sustenance for employers today and a future for them tomorrow, that's the challenge. That's what everybody should be talking about. Not my f*cking language because it doesn't matter."

"I think it was Confucius who said that 'Money talks and bullshit walks."

What happened to network television in the 1980s? How did CBS, NBC, and ABC lose a third of their audience and more than half of their annual profits?

Ken Auletta, author of Greed and Glory on Wall Street, tells the gripping story of the decline of the networks in this epically scaled work of journalism. He chronicles the takeovers and executive coups that turned ABC and NBC into assets of two mega-corporations and CBS into the fiefdom of one man, Larry Tisch, whose obsession with the bottom line could be both bracing and appalling.

Auletta takes us inside the CBS newsroom on the night that Dan Rather went off-camera for six deadly minutes; into the screening rooms where NBC programming wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff watched two of his brightest prospects for new series thud disastrously to earth; and into the boardrooms where the three networks were trying to decide whether television is a public trust or a cash cow.

Rich in anecdote and gossip, scalpel-sharp in its perceptions, Three Blind Mice chronicles a revolution in American business and popular culture, one that is changing the world on both sides of the television screen.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Forbes: the legendary name in finance journalism. Synonymous with wealth, grand excess, glamour, and fun as well as style, insight, gossip, and hard-nosed reporting, the media empire and the family behind it form a remarkable story that has never been told. Now, in The Fall of the House of Forbes, veteran journalist Stewart Pinkerton reveals the hidden machinations, disastrous decisions, and personal foibles of a century-old dynasty that rose to glittering heights and crashed just as spectacularly.

Writing from an insider's perspective and first-hand sources developed over his twenty years as a writer and editor at Forbes, Pinkerton takes us to the ritualized formal lunches inside the mansion-like headquarters at 60 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan; the lavish advertiser parties on board the family yacht, The Highlander; the sybaritic private life of Malcolm Forbes and the family's increasing discomfort with its patriarch; and the glory days of the magazine, with its news-making stories, high-rolling expense accounts, and bar-setting standards for anyone who aspired to wealth and its trappings. But as the media business changed, Forbes was slow to react, and found itself burdened by Malcolm's immense personal expenses, Steve Forbes's bumbling, self-financed presidential campaigns, and the family's hubris and hesitation in the face of reality. A series of devastating business decisions and an internecine struggle for power forced the sale of the Faberge eggs, the vintage toy collection, the homes, the private island, the yacht, and finally the sale of 40% of the company itself to outside investors...a collapse of shocking speed after decades of unsurpassed success.

A compelling narrative account of a powerful family's dysfunction, The Fall of the House of Forbes is a parable of capitalism at its best and worst, and a metaphor for the current state of digital turmoil in media.

"All you need to know about the industry at a time of momentous change."
-Drake McFeely, chairman and president, W.W. Norton & Company

For nearly five centuries, the world of book publishing remained largely static. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the industry faces a combination of economic pressures and technological change that is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the book.

John Thompson's riveting account dissects the roles of publishers, agents, and booksellers in the United States and Britain, charting their transformation since the 1960s. Offering an in-depth analysis of how the digital revolution is changing the game today, Merchants of Culture is the one book that anyone with a stake in the industry needs to read.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Netflix has come a long way since 1997, when two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Marc Ran­dolph and Reed Hastings, decided to start an online DVD store before most people owned a DVD player. They were surprised and elated when launch-day traffic in April 1998 crashed their server and resulted in 150 sales. Today, Netflix has more than 25 million subscribers and annual revenues above $3 billion. Yet long- term success-or even survival-is still far from guaranteed. Journalist Gina Keating recounts the absorbing, fast-paced drama of the company's turbulent rise to the top and its attempt to invent two new kinds of business. First it engaged in a grueling war against video-store behemoth Blockbuster, transforming movie rental forever. Then it jumped into an even bigger battle for online video streaming against Google, Hulu, Amazon, and the big cable companies. Netflix ushered in such innovations as DVD rental by mail, a patented online queue of upcom­ing rentals, and a recommendation algorithm called Cinematch that proved crucial in its struggle against bigger rivals. Yet for all its success, Netflix is still a polariz­ing company. Hastings is often heralded as a visionary-he was named Business Person of the Year in 2010 by Fortune-even as he has been called the nation's worst CEO. Netflix also faces disgruntled customers after price increases and other stumbles that could tarnish the brand forever. The quest to become the world's portal for pre­mium video on demand will determine nothing less than the future of entertainment and the Internet. Drawing on extensive new interviews and her years covering Netflix as a financial and entertainment reporter, Keating makes this tale as absorbing as it is important.