An Essay Pulling Ideas from The Long Tale By Chris Anderson

An Essay, Stream of Ideas, Rant, Pulling Ideas From The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is a book about how ecommerce changes the nature of niche products and the products available for people to buy. With places like Amazon it is possible to maintain a huge backlist of books, more than any physical bookstore can hold. On the other side Alibris can do a similar thing and aggregate huge numbers of used bookstores together. The ultimate endpoint however is with products like Itunes which can essentially build huge backlists of information products, over a million songs available for download.

I am using some of the ideas from reading this book as well as my own ideas in writing this essay, rant, or collection of thoughts. I am just putting down my thoughts as they come.

Physical stores become shallow with the most on demand immediately buyable titles. For example when I went to Barnes and Noble, I looked for the most popular recent titles that were available which I could add to my selection list. These titles in a way were not ideal because they might not be things that people will use over and over again across a long time period. Barnes and Nobles focuses on general material. It cannot match specialty retailers which sell used material that people still want like the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. Barnes and Noble at one point had a used book annex in lower Manhattan. It closed.

Libraries will have a place with older and specialty material. Publishers often rely on libraries to sell their backlist. Titles like The Prince, Huckleberry Finn, The Iron Heel, The Color Purple, are much more likely to be found easily in a library than a bookstore.

However, things will not remain the same. Increasingly many of the books not under copyright have become freely available on the internet through sites like Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org. Also many out of copyright images have been made available through http://www.wikimedia.org . People still prefer reading these books in the physical form. Reading on a screen is not very easy. However, this will change as new technologies change the resolution of computer screens.

Also, because of Print On Demand, books are no longer considered out of print anymore. This is still being resisted because of the problem of returns. However, I think with a focus on greening books, this will change. Already, the concept of "Cradle to Cradle" is seeping into the book industry. It is possible to redesign books so they are much easier to dismantle, recycle, or reuse.



Changes in how books are made and used will make it much easier to handle the problmes of returns and disposal of books.

It is not just books which are possibly going to be made on demand. With more advanced fabbing technology, it will be possible to make a greater variety of manufactured goods available on demand. Incorporating the Cradle to Cradle concept into fab manufacturing could create easily reusable products that can be dismantled for their components quickly. Another book whch talks about this is Bruce Sterling's famous essay, Shaping Things



Getting back to the idea of print on demand. Print on demand is available to practically anyone to make books. Through a service like lulu, http://www.lulu.com I can turn a book which I made into a print on demand product for approximately $200. Then I can sell the book through Amazon. This opens the market to an incredible variety of new material.

Even if physical books are available as print on demand, there is still the potential for ebooks. Like itunes, there could be an almost limitless backlist if you could have the choice of print on demanding at a kiosk or simply downloading a book to a reader. This is not as far off as many people think. The Kindle and The Sony Reader are the first generation of E-ink. Electronic ink is not a mature technology. It is what allows people to read on their cell phone or blackberry.
It will mature and get better. http://www.eink.com

According to Chris Anderson people seem to want to have more choice. The more choice they have the wider they read or listen. Effectively, less bestsellers are being sold and more niche products are being used. With unlimited choice in information, along with guides on how to get and use that information people vary their information choices.

In The Long Tail he criticizes the library for using the antiquated dewey decimal system. He calls it a dead system. In many ways, he is correct. He also says that it is biased towards western thought. I think in some ways he is correct. As a halfway step, many libraries have introduced merchandising to pull together similar subjects in an area that would be under different dewey numbers.
A few libraries have even adopted parts of the bookstore classification scheme. The proper term is Book Industry Standard And Classification.
http://www.bisg.org/publications/bisac_subj_faq.html#What%20does%20BISAC%20stand%20for

Also, when Yahoo looked for its classification scheme to organize one of the first internet directories, they found that they could not use Library of Congress Subject Headings. The subject divisions were counterintuitive and most people simply could not understand them. Yahoo had to create its own classification system. Google had to create its own taxonomy as well.

The concept of Wikipedia is discussed in
The Long Tail. Wikipedia entries are non-authoritative. Libraries are bastions of authoritative information. Virtually everything which we buy is supposed to be reviewed by us or sourced from review material. This is of course quite difficult. Despite having massive amounts of magazines and reviews, we simply cannot get coverage on everything which we buy. We usually preface something when we look it up on Wikipedia, this is not authoritative and we cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided. This is true of much of the internet.

There is a lot of material in The Long Tail that is quite useful for librarians, book people, and publishers seeking to understand the changing context of information. I would recommend that if you work with publishing or writing you should read this book.

I can see myself in a changing environment where my job is no longer to just search for what is available within our four walls, but instead to direct people to places outside of the physical four walls to location in cyberspace as well as go to other locations as well as recommend material for people ro read and use.

Many of the things he talks about are in the context of marketing and ecommerce. When I am writing this article, I am interpreting and using the information he provides in a different context. I took what I found useful out of the book. The litte chart with the tale wasn't my primary interest. This makes my interpretation different than the writer probably originally intended.

This is a link to the original article which the book was based on.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html . Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, is the chief editor of Wired Magazine.

Cradle to Cradle Print On Demand Kiosk Book System-- A Syncretic Idea

Occassionally, I get syncretic ideas, ideas which combine two or more things into something new. The idea is that you would take a print on demand book kiosk system and design the books coming out of the system so they can be recycled completely back into the system. A person would buy the book from the kiosk, then get a deposit when they returned the book.

You would go to the kiosk look at a selection of materials then key in the material you were interested in and the book would be printed once you made your selection and paid for it.

The books would be designed as a cradle to cradle product. The pages would use ink that could be reclaimed, instead of paper you would use a thin plastic which could be printed on multiple times, the glue could be removed as well, the cover could be stripped off and reused.

Initially the book would cost a little more, but costs would be reduced because the books would be recycled. I was thinking you would have a few standard size formats and would initially focus on plain text books without illustrations. Maybe the classics or things which people would read a lot over and over again.

Please comment on the idea.

A Few Duds.

I took some books home to read over the weekend, but I can't really get myself to read them. They are not as good as I thought they would be. I had to put one of the books down after reading the first chapter of the book. I try to read at least the first chaper before I put down a book.

The second one might be alright. I am not enthused with it. Sometimes there just isn't that much interesting to read. Or maybe, I want to look at something else.

$100 Laptop Prototype-- Design Continuum.

Quite honestly, I am not enthused with the idea of having masses of books around. I really do think there is such a thing as having too many books. When you read as many books as I do, you get to realize that a lot of books probably shouldn't have been published.

A lot of people will hate me for this. I am not impressed with a house full of books, unless there is something exceptional about them. If you have a house full of books on horses I might be impressed, or if you have a house full of beautiful art books, or mystery books I might be impressed.

Part of this is the way people use the book as a sign of intellectuality. You can buy books by the foot with certain types of binding, or request a certain type of book as a backdrop for a film or television show. This is more a sign of having a hoard of jewels than intellectual prominence. Lawyers and CEOs buy books to fill their offices often to show they are smart.

Most books do not survive. I think the average shelf life of a book in a bookstore is about two weeks to a month. Imagine a giant room full of paper where in a month or two, the majority of it will be recycled.

I don't think everything in print should be saved. A lot of people think of a book as a sacred object. The content inside the book is what is sacred. It would be incredible if we could preserve everything that was written for all time. I look forward to the day when I can go into a bookstore and in five minutes have a choice of having a bound book, or an electronic download of everything ever printed. The same goes for libraries. It would also be interesting if we could also do the same thing with movies, music, and other forms of expression.

Packaging does not fascinate me. I wouldn't mind if I could see what the book looked like when it was finished before I bought it, but I don't need to see piles of 25 copies of it arranged in different patterns.

I am not a luddite. The main value of having printed books is if they are illustrated-- The resolution of paper is still much higher than digital books. But, if they are not illustrated, it is a waste of resources to have a building stuffed with paper.

I am saying this in the sense, that if we could put all of the books inside a print on demand machine or download on demand machine, it might be better than having a house of paper. Also we would need to have the machine easily searchable and readily available for people to use.

I understand the comfortableness of the used bookstore. It has an air of coffee and old things. The propietor might be your grumpy neighbor. There might even be a nice cat, or even a dog.

I also understand the need to hoard things in piles. Messy piles of paper on desks, bookmarks, old books, videos in piles, drawers full of forms, and fliers. It happens to me like many librarians.

I too am afraid of the mad path of "creative destruction" running through American capitalist society tearing apart my profession. I have watched the positions for librarians shrink as well as the number of booksellers. There are less and less of us in the world.


I would be less concerned with this if more books were designed with the cradle to cradle philosophy. Cradle to Cradle Rethinking The Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Baungart is a fairly radical idea. It says you should design things so they can be completely reused. The book Cradle to Cradle is designed this way. You can remove the ink with natural solvents and reuse the ink to print an entirely different book.

There is a certain ambivalence in all this. I am not sure if I am lying to myself on this one, people are so good at self delusion...