Alderman, John. Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001.
Anderson, Chris. Free: The Future of a Radical Price. New York: Hyperion, 2009.
———. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
Auletta, Ken. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio, 2005.
Coburn, Pip. The Change Function: Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn. New York: Portfolio, 2006.
Coleman, Mark. Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money. New York: Da Capo, 2003.
Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009.
Epstein, Edward Jay. The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood. New York: Random House, 2005. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Hollywood works.
———. The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010.
Epstein, Jason. Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Fisher, William W., III. Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Law and Politics, 2004.
Goldsmith, Jack, and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. A prescient look at the future of law online and a thoroughly researched rejoinder to anyone who thinks it won’t have one.
Goldstein, Paul. Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Law and Politics, 2003. An excellent introduction to copyright—thorough enough for almost anyone, but accessible enough for beginners.
Gomez, Jeff. Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Goodman, Fred. Fortune’s Fool: Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
Gorman, Robert A., and Jane C. Ginsberg. Copyright: Cases and Materials. 7th ed. New York: Foundation Press, 2006.
Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Helprin, Mark. Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto. New York: Harper, 2009.
Henry, Neil. American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Hyde, Lewis. Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Jones, Alex. Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Knee, Jonathan A., Bruce C. Greenwald, and Ana Seave. The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies. New York: Portfolio, 2009.
Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. New York: Free Press, 2009.
Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Lardner, James. Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the VCR Wars. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. A genuinely thrilling account of Sony’s introduction of the VCR and the legal case that followed.
Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
———. Code: Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Although I find Lessig’s arguments on copyright unconvincing, this defined the debate over online regulation in ways that still echo today.
———. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
———. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.
———. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.
Levy, Steven. The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Liebowitz, Stan. Re-thinking the Network Economy: The True Forces That Drive the Digital Marketplace. New York: AMACOM, 2002.
Litman, Jessica. Digital Copyright. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001.
Menn, Joseph. All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster. New York: Crown Business, 2003. The definitive take on one of the most interesting business stories of the decade.
Merriden, Trevor. Irresistible Forces: The Business Legacy of Napster and the Growth of the Underground Internet. Oxford: Capstone, 2001.
Meza, Philip E. Coming Attractions? Hollywood, High Tech, and the Future of Entertainment. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Business Books, 2007.
Palmer, Shelly. Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV. 2nd ed. White Plains, N.Y.: York House Press, 2008.
Passman, Donald S. All You Need to Know About the Music Business. 7th ed. New York: Free Press, 2009. The ultimate reference book by one of today’s smartest music lawyers.
Patry, William. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Poundstone, William. Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. A fascinating look at why things really cost what they do.
Reback, Gary L. Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive. New York: Portfolio, 2009.
Shapiro, Carl, and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
Ulin, Jeffrey C. The Business of Media Distribution: Monetizing Film, TV, and Video Content in an Online World. Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2010.
Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008.
Ars Technica, arstechnica.com. Some of the smartest reporting on these issues available online.
Billboard.biz, www.billboard.biz.
CNET News Media, news.cnet.com. Especially Greg Sandoval’s Media Maverick column at news.cnet.com/media-maverick.
Content Bridges, www.contentbridges.com.
Copyhype, www.copyhype.com. (Terry Hart, who writes this blog, helped check my legal reporting and became a friend.) A historical analysis of copyright issues, full of references to case law.
Copyrights & Campaigns, copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com.
Edward Jay Epstein’s Web Log, edjayepstein.blogspot.com.
Media Decoder (blog), New York Times, mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com.
Music Technology Policy, musictechpolicy.wordpress.com.
Public Knowledge Policy Blog, www.publicknowledge.org/blog.
Reflections of a Newsosaur, newsosaur.blogspot.com.
The Register, www.theregister.co.uk.
TorrentFreak, torrentfreak.com.
Wired.com, www.wired.com. Especially Eliot Van Buskirk’s music business coverage at www.wired.com/epicenter.