blurb

According to Wikipedia entry under "Gelett Burgess":

The word "blurb", meaning a short description of a book, film, or other product written for promotional purposes, was coined by Burgess in 1907, in attributing the cover copy of his book, Are You a Bromide?, to a Miss Belinda Blurb. His definition of "blurb" is "a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial".

Apparently, the first recorded use of this word was in 1907 in an American comic book. The cover featured a buxom young lady with the name Miss Blinda Blurb. Blurb became the term for the eye-catching advertisement on a book jacket.

Would you use this interchangably with précis? I'm fine with having an English version of a French word that almost nobody will be able to pronounce correctly, but blurb is a little too prosaic.

sounds like suburb, or worse yet, sub-blurb

Modern life is one short bite-sized piece of information after another. The internet, symbol of the age, is designed to actively fire information at our passive eyes. Yet more so the television. On the back of books, those edifices which we once thought would weather the storm of the information age, are those brief, digestible, active and aggresive things which sum this whole sorry state up.