Tube of Plenty

By Erik Barnouw,

Book cover of Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television

Book description

Tube of Plenty is an abridgement of Erik Barnouw's classic 3-volume History of Broadcasting in the United States. The paperback edition was first published in 1976 and a second edition in 1982.

Much has happened in television in the 1980s; the decline of the three major networks, the expansion of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Tube of Plenty as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

When we set out to start writing our TV history book, we didn’t know what we didn’t know about the topic. Fortunately, we found the first edition of this book. It was invaluable to us to describe and explain where radio and television came from and how they came to be as we knew them.

This one-volume book distills the author’s masterful earlier three-volume set on this topic. Barnouw blazed the trail for us by treating broadcasting as worthy of serious historical research and analysis while never failing to make the oft-complex tales engrossing and entertaining reading. The updated second…

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