It was fun, a fun book.

Primarially the people and companies of the end of the record industry cash-cow, less real investigation into the systems and stats of vinyl being replaced by 0's and 1's.

I enjoyed it, most people will.

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Lazily written rock journalism masquerading as historical analysis. Knopper is inordinately preoccupied with giving name dropping character studies of record executive excess, and largely devoid of insight into how the industry got left so far behind. ( )

It has sometimes been tough for me to find a nonfiction book with the spark and accessibility to make a potentially difficult topic easy to read about. Appetite for Self-Destruction, which chronicles the record industry's failure to move with technology in the digital age, could easily have become bogged down in techno-speak, transcripts of board meetings, and the minute differences between audio files. The reason I picked up a book on this particular, potentially inaccessible, topic was that the first chapter I read on the NPR website described a baseball game in which angry rock fans destroyed disco records with such engaging flourish that I actually wanted to know what happened next.

The engaging and accessible tone continued the whole way through, so I was never bored. I also particularly enjoyed the book because it took a number of events that I remembered just by virtue of being a teenager in the late 90s/early 2000s, and put them together into a comprehensive picture about the record industry's belated and uncoordinated response to mp3s, Napster, and all the tech that followed. I truly enjoyed the book, and recommend it to others. ( )