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One of the Best Books of the Year
The San Francisco Chronicle The Philadelphia Inquirer Vox The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term "net neutrality"-a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.

Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention.
This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century´s growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu´s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium-from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook-has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.

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"Vigorous, entertaining. . . . Wu describes how the rise of electronic media established human attention as perhaps the world´s most valuable commodity." -The Boston Globe

"The Attention Merchants is a book of our time, touching on an emerging strain of anxiety about the information age. . . . A bracing intellectual tour de force." -The San Francisco Chronicle

"Comprehensive and conscientious, readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet." -The New York Times

"A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention. . . . We´ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves." -The New Republic

"The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed. . . . Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect." -The New York Times Book Review

"An engaging history of the attention economy. . . . [Wu] wants to show us how our current conditions arose." -The Washington Post

"Dazzling. . . . [Wu] could hardly have chosen a better time to publish a history of attention-grabbing. . . . He traces a sustained march of marketers further into our lives." -The Financial Times

" [An] erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history of one of humanity´s core undertakings-getting other people to care about stuff that matters to you." -Boing Boing

"Engaging and informative. . . . [Wu´s] account . . . is a must-read." -The Washington Times

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Tim Wu is a policy advocate and professor at Columbia Law School. In 2006, Scientific American named him one of fifty leaders in science and technology; in 2013, National Law Journal included him among "America´s 100 Most Influential Lawyers"; and in 2014 and 2015, he was named to the "Politico 50." He won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for travel journalism and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

http://www.timwu.org

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