Videoland

Daniel Herbert is Assistant Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Video Rental and the "Shopping" of Media Part I. The History and Culture of Video Rental 1. A Long Tale 2. Practical Classifications Part II. Video Stores and the Localization of Movie Culture 3. Video Capitals 4. Video Rental in Small-Town America Part III. Circulations of Video Store Culture 5. Distributing Value 6. Mediating Choice: Criticism, Advice, Metadata Coda: The Value of the Tangible Notes Selected Bibliography Index

"Herbert effectively traces a genealogy of movies from the strip malls of yesteryear to today's rootless culture of moving-image consumption." -- Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa Film Comment "Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store is an unusual and often unusually compelling study of the emergence and disappearance of American movie-rental stores." -- Clayton Dillard Slant "Videoland...offers an outstanding analysis of film as material object embedded within a specific cultural moment, and it is, I believe, a must-read for students of media history." -- Linnie Blake Times Higher Education "Daniel Herbert's fascinating new study, Videoland, recalls a time that seems impossibly remote, even though it barely ended a decade ago." -- Michael S. Gant SantaCruz.com "Herbert's attention to the interlopers and improbable pioneers who helped propel movie culture forward in the 1980s and 1990s is a welcome addition to other recent examinations of home video as well as the emerging field of media industries." -- Kevin McDonald Discourse "In juxtaposing media industry studies with a specific eye toward Americana and regionalism, Videoland offers a loving tribute to the video store as a significant space in media history." -- David Lerner Spectator "Written in a clear, clean, accessible style, this is a masterful study of a cultural moment whose time has come and gone." -- Wheeler Winston Dixon CHOICE "Through [his] interviews, he creates a richly textured sense of the culture that existed in many video stores, of the way the stores were woven into their local communities, and of the economic challenges the stores confronted in a shifting technological landscape." -- Brian L. Ott Journal of American History "Herbert's interdisciplinary methodology is one of the book's chief achievements. Comprised of excellent historical research and cultural analysis, Videoland also makes an important contribution to a range of subfields within film and media studies, including media distribution, media history, taste cultures, film criticism, and ethnographic audience research." -- Maureen Rogers Velvet Light Trap "An accessible history of the video rental store and its impact on media consumption." -- Kristopher Purzycki Film Criticism