Pass The Popcorn and Sno-Caps

The holiday season is always a good time to take in a bunch of movies. The one sticking out for me has been Lincoln. I didn’t yet see Les Miserables, but having seen the play seven or eight times, I can assure you it is a great story.

This past week I saw the underachieving This Is 40, the gratuitously violent Django, and the surprisingly good Silver Linings.

The movies still offer an escape for me. I love going to the theater as much as I enjoy going to a bookstore and losing myself for a few hours. In the theater’s darkness, I am enlightened. Seated alone, I feel a part of a community. Ideas flow from the huge screen into my mind. The movies nurture me in a way only books can.

Bookstores are my temple, my sanctuary…but movie theaters rank right up there. I look forward to a new crop of movies in 2013. Each one represents an adventure, one I can’t wait to go on.

100 People Are Worth Nearly Two Trillion Dollars

The list of the 100 richest people in the world was released this past week and it was determined that the top 100 people grew their combined wealth by 241 billion dollars in just the past year, rising to over 1.9 trillion dollars. Each person averages a net worth of 19 billion dollars. To put that into perspective, the whole fiscal cliff negotiation that nearly left the country on the brink of disaster will only yield an average of 60 billion a year in new tax revenue. These 100 people run the world when you also factor in that each person can leverage his or her wealth in many ways. For instance, one rich person can influence other rich people. For another, the wealthy can gain access to low-cost loans to expand their buying power. Now, if just one of these people decided to invest heavily in the book publishing industry we would see a historic transformation for books. Then again, if they invested too much into the book world, they may not be worth as much as they are now!

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2013 ©