Twitter's great because it acts as a kind of triage mechanism for new books I'd like to read. Several of my friends are avid readers -- surprising given their time commitments to their professional and family duties -- and one of them based in Shanghai recently suggested I have a look at Mike Walsh's Futuretainment.

Futuretainment isn't your typical sort of read. For one, it's issued by boutique publisher Phaidon Press, and weighing in at 274pp and boasting decidedly non-standard binding, heft, and colour design, it's a work not for the faint of heart. On a recent flight in from Europe, I likely made myself and the people sitting around me slightly high from the strong page odour, heavily-scented as it was with ink preservative and "new page smell."

As for style, if you're expecting the long-form prose of a how-to DIY sort of book, don't be.

Each page is tastefully adorned with a photo from Walsh's sharp Flickr collection. The copy is spartan but contemplative. In its brevity it's well-organized, the kind of material you inhale within a couple of minutes but which you think about long after you put the thing down, or at least that was my feeling.

Walsh indeed dives into lot of subjects, but one of my main takeaways was his discussion of micropayments and how these are all the rage in Asia -- especially in South Korea and, more lately, in China. Walsh posits that the next new internet payment mechanism -- on a PayPal scale -- will emerge from the Asian tiger economies, much of it emanating from virtual gaming communities where users are encouraged to purchase virtual currencies and other "commodities" that they can then trade between themselves for real currency. It got so bad in China in one famous case, that the Chinese government was concerned that a parallel shadow economy was rising up in its place.

If a system can be established, says Walsh, whereby transactions can occur at the touch of a button for miniscule amounts -- five cents, ten cents -- amounts that currently don't caputre the interests of the large payment processors like PayPal but which -- on massive turnover -- can be of interest to an emerging Asian payment processor catering to this vaster market to make this profitable on volume, a five-cent, ten-cent model could actually work well.

Walsh sticks to his knitting throughout the read: his throughline is that traditional advertising is dead and gone. Television advertising maintains its chokehold on the market only in areas where there exists only a single-channel broadcasting outlet, otherwise it no longer has the monopoly on the consumer's front of mind of awareness as it had in times past. He even proposes many new and novel techniques -- not all of them his, but summarized nicely for the reader -- for marketers to generate increased awareness for their products and services, for example, by lurking in places where their various communities congregate, spending more time with their targets. Now that big brash ads are tuned out in a nanosecond, consumers are looking to be a part of the overall advertising process -- even assisting in making a company's ads (i.e. crowdsourcing) and getting word about their products, turning the entire industry on its head in a way even the legendary David Ogilvy himself never could have envisioned in his seminal work ON ADVERTISING.

If you pick up the book for any reason at all, it will be to enjoy the photos and Walsh's media wisdom. His many perspectives on Asia are particularly a propos for all China Hands -- both aspiring newbies and Old China Hands alike. The book is a trove of tips about emerging media trends, online advertising, crowdsourced campaigns, and is slapdashed with Walsh's many historical perspectives and several intriguing factoids which he successfully sprinkles throughout.

Again, thanks to Marc in Shanghai for -- again -- being the stimulus for this purchase.