is the internet a penny paper?

JUST TODAY my hold came through for The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. !!! You had me at lunar man-bats! Someone recommended this at work and it sounded like just my kind of bizarre are you kidding me non-fiction. Here's the front jacket flap text:

On Wednesday, August 26, 1835, a fledgling newspaper called the Sun brought to New York the first accounts of remarkable lunar discoveries. A series of six articles purported to reveal the existence of life on the moon--including unicorns, beavers that walked upright on their hind legs, and, strangest of all, four-foot-tall flying man-bats. In a matter of weeks the series became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era, and the Sun, a brash working-class upstart less than two-years old, had become the most widely read newspaper in the world.

In The Sun and the Moon, journalist and historian Matthew Goodman chronicles the hot summer of 1835, when the Sun's editor convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited.

... Evoking a seminal, chaotic period in the city's history, the book overflows with larger-than-life characters, including Richard Adams Locke, author of the moon series; a fledgling showman named P.T. Barnum, who had just brought his own hoax to New York; and the young writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was convinced that the moon series was a plagiarism of his own work.

An exhilarating narrative history of a divided city on the cusp of greatness and a crew of writers, authors, editors, and charlatans who stumbled on a new kind of journalism. The Sun and the Moon tells the surprisingly true story of the penny papers that made America into a nation of newspaper readers. (end flap-text)

UNICORNS? BEAVERS? MAN-BATS? EDGAR ALLAN POE? I hope this book is half as awesome as it sounds. It's hard to believe that this was 65 years before Méliès and his Voyage to the Moon. Has there been a modern movie made about this? It seems like the topic would lend itself to that medium. (LUNAR MAN- BATS!) Anyway, I haven't read anything but the jacket yet, but it seemed too good to keep to myself.