Also, per the link above, inasmuch as the book market has lost 2/3 of its value in 20 years, they probably feel (consciously or not) it best to promote said market instead of taking it down further.
Actually, early online was significantly walled gardens: remember America Online, Compuserve, etc?
Sure, but the OP seemed to be about the downward slide since “peak”. AOL, CompuServ, etc were minor players by the 2010-2015 era and walled “portals” weren’t much of a thing. Much like we weren’t all using the local BBS services of the 80s any longer either.
Lol. I liked Watchmen, but nothing else he’s done has resonated. And he was a big part of ruining Star Wars, so there’s that too.
Yes, the algorithm is very one-note these days: the last you played is the note you keep getting.
Aren’t you assuming that the recordings are new–or do you know that? I mean, they could be from 1948 onward (when LPs first came out). I have a ton of classical on vinyl from the 1950s through 1970s that sounds great. There was a huge amount recorded in the 1980s for CDs after they came out in 1983. And of course a lot ever since.
Even if it’s newly recorded stuff, there are a countable but substantial number of symphonies all around the world that can make money off of recording. When I go to a concert, usually they have something new or obscure in there, even if most of it is the standard crowd-pleaser stuff. So I think the incentive system is in place for classical music variety to exist. A good thing, of course.
I think it’s fascinating that you have all of these mags and can quote things chapter and verse. 
As for whether his stories hold up, here’s one of my faves for you and the lurkers:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29509/29509-h/29509-h.htm
I’d call that almost perfect. I think he’s got a substantial number of first-rate stories, a lot that’s just entertaining, and definitely some misses. I’d say his biggest weakness comes in the ending of stories. Some of the misses are very good stories ruined by a bad ending. Another weakness is the novel format: in general, his novels are not that good overall. Probably Options is his best, IMHO.
Oh, that’s barely parody. I forget which book, but there’s one where all of these superhumans are using a different language for every type of thing they are trying to say. Like, c’mon, Herb.
I am curious whether they are going to try to film Dune Messiah, since it’s bad, it’s a downer, and perhaps the most important events (Paul becoming Space Hitler) have happened between the first and second novel with no explanation. We’ve all heard the rule, “Show, don’t tell”; Herbert takes it to the next level by not even telling!
Lynch’s version is visually stunning and extremely, earnestly campy, so it works for me. The new version looks overly serious and dull, and I have no interest in exploring the story any more, so I haven’t seen it. I can totally see why someone would think it to be a better version of the book, however.
Yeah, there is a lot of CYA at work. I feel as though risk averseness has increased across the economic system. A lot.
Because old music - and old books - get filtered out. I’m reading the Biographical Dictionary of Film, and I suspect that most of the silent era movies from some of the older people in the book are no longer available. Even if they are, they are hard to get.
When I was an undergrad I used to visit the Brattle Bookstore in Boston. You can see the most recent proprietor on Antiques Roadshow. There I discovered novels by Winston Churchill. No, not that one, this one. A well known novelist from the turn of the 20th century. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of his novels are online somewhere, but to your average person they are gone.
It might not be true anymore since we store new content on line, but we were talking about content from well before the internet, some from well before even recorded music. Back then people bought sheet music because that was the only way to remember what was played at a concert.
That’s the reason I have my office filled with bookcases, and other rooms too. I don’t throw sf out or donate it when I’m done with it for this very reason.
It also demonstrates why there were more bad reviews then. Relatively fewer books published, relatively more magazines. The magazine in question was a spin off of F&SF and while good it did not last very long. (A later spinoff lasted even shorter.) But it had a book review column. Knight wrote for a relatively obscure magazine, I think, and also fanzines. I don’t think reviewers don’t do bad reviews today to protect the market, with smaller page counts for reviews why waste them on junk, unless it is best selling junk or junk done by a major name.
(The rest of your response I mostly agree with. Not ignoring you, just agreeing.)
An interesting and clever point!
I read somewhere a couple of years ago that some 65,000 (!) novels are published in English every year. How many of those sell at all? Not many. A smaller number is those that have any impact on pop culture (very few these days). A smaller number is those that, fairly or unfairly, are retained by the popular imagination for any length of time. I think that retention number might be the one to use for your “linear growth,” and I think it is a small one indeed, regardless of medium (music, novels, video games, etc.) and genre.
I’ve actually heard of him! Pertinent to that time period, I used to work in the mall of the basement of the Crown Point, IN, courthouse back in the 1980s, and we had a resale shop nextdoor, so I would regularly go in and look for stuff to buy or just to borrow, and I found a novel from around 1915 or so. It concerned a well-to-do man about town and his romantic interests, etc. Now, the author couldn’t (I suppose at that time) write about him bedding women and whatnot, so it was all innuendo and so on. Well, we get to the 1930s and have things like Tropic of Cancer (novel) - Wikipedia, and all of those books that had written about sex in a veiled sort of way were obsolete. The novel From Here to Eternity (novel) - Wikipedia from 1951 is shockingly sexual, involving military men going to prostitutes, including gay prostitutes (whereas the movie with Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed is shockingly anodyne and cleaned up!). So those older books truly have no cultural pertinence or interest today, and the fact that they were thrown out wholesale can’t be said to be much of a tragedy. OTOH, the best 19th century novels and poetry have aged well precisely because they are from another time and written in a style that, while obsolete, is excellent and engaging.
What you say is probably a sufficient cause for not doing negative reviews. OTOH, there is a whole cottage industry on YouTube for trashing contemporary movies (there is a lot to trash there, however), but the supply/demand situation is totally different.
No prob. I have found your comments edifying, thank you!
That … but for other reasons.
Phone and tablet is “read-only" mode for me. Too Bothersome to type.
I definitely agree with you. This is particularly noticeable with news, to me.
I’m the reverse - I blame the group, not the corps. It is the users who refuse to pay a subscription fee and refuse to tolerate ads sufficient to pay the price of the content. They then justify stealing it because it should be free and ad-free and they don’t give a thought to actual compensation for the content creators or distributors. Fact is, people like free stuff, and would rather have free stuff and the internet makes it really easy to steal digital stuff rather than pay for it.
Well, yeah, because if you block the ads, the ads don’t pay for it.
To respond to the point about ads, the corps implemented the following system:
- It didn’t require a subscription, which was always possible from the beginning and done by only a few pubs (e.g., NYT).
- It was a combination of highly irritating (popups, etc.), unusable (sometimes you can’t even read a page on your phone because of the ads), and dangerous (malware, etc.) to its users.
- Allowed ad blockers, at least at first (it was possible to access the sites with an ad blocker, and there was no command not to use one).
I think the above is just the facts, but correct me if I’m wrong. Then the whole debate about the ethics of ad blockers (which I don’t think we should have here) takes place in the context of those facts.
But there is another debate to be had, which is whether users could be expected not to use ad blockers when such a system was presented to them. And I don’t such an expectation was warranted, and the implementation of the system above was incompetent (which is different from saying the corps were stupid; they were dealing with ever shifting technologies and social systems, and they were fumbling in the dark).