Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet

One clue to the tone of this book is the chapter titled, "Do You Know the World Wide Whatever?" Author John Motavalli portrays the old media moguls as hapless entrepreneurs whose avarice and ill-thought-out ideas about the (then) brand new Web cost some of the largest entertainment and media companies millions. To wit: Recall giant Time Warner ultimately "merging" (also known as getting hoovered by) America Online. There are many examples of such catastrophes throughout the book but Motavalli pays close attention to Time Warner's Jerry Levin. The reader can follow Levin's story from the dream of a Web presence to the eventual absorption into the media vacuum that is AOL. The stories are loaded with more hubris than a Sophocles' cycle—and hopefully some lessons, too.