Playing for Profit: How Digital Entertainment is Making Big Business Out of Child's Play

by Alice LaPlante, Rich Seidner

Playing for Profit A little over a century ago, an intense explosion of technical innovation transformed the way we spent our leisure time. Inventions like the phonograph, television, radio, and motion pictures sparked a revolution in entertainment that captured the hearts--and the wallets--of the average consumer.

287 pages, Hardcover

First published April 26, 1999

About the author

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer. She also teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her fiction has been widely published in Epoch, Southwestern Review, and other literary journals. Alice is the author of five books, including the LA Times bestseller Method and Madness: The Making of a Story (W.W. Norton 2009). Her latest book, the novel Turn of Mind, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2011 and won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for 2011. She lives with her family in Northern California.