Book Recommendations May 5 2007

I’ve been scouring the bookstores for this particular title. All of the Fully Booked and Powerbooks branches in the metro either have never heard of the book or have it on order basis. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers by Henry Jenkins takes a look at how media influences the geek culture with focus on the digital age. The estimated price of the book is about P1,200.00 on order basis from Fully Booked.

Bringing together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumers, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers takes readers from Jenkins’s progressive early work defending fan culture against those who would marginalize or stigmatize it, through to his more recent work, combating moral panic and defending Goths and gamers in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Starting with an interview on the current state of fan studies, this volume maps the core theoretical and methodological issues in Fan Studies. It goes on to chart the growth of participatory culture on the web, discuss blogging as perhaps the most powerful illustration of how consumer participation impacts mainstream media, and debate the public policy implications surrounding participation and intellectual property.

Another book – this one I have on the shelf – is Dominic Gettins’ How to Write Great Copy: Learn the Unwritten Rules of Copywriting. It is an easy-to-follow book about .. err .. writing great copy. I appreciate the way Gettins tackles copywriting also from a technical standpoint, knowing when to apply which grammar rule to a particular situation for maximum effectiveness.

…”a shortcut to the sort of knowledge gained by trial and error over many years by the icons of the advertising business.”