The Economics of Attention by Richard A Lanham

If there's one thing the internet has not brought about, contrary to all prediction, it's the destruction of literature. As the author of this consistently interesting argument notes, we have been liberated into a bibliotopia almost unimaginable to previous generations, with Amazon selling millions of second-hand books at cut-price rates, and Google digitising university libraries for (hopefully) free usage. It's not literary or artistic values that are under threat, but the opportunity to pay even the most cursory attention to what lies before us. Our true scarcity is attention, not culture... (more)

Independent Online Edition > Reviews