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.

The Gorilla Librarian, Variant Nursery Rhyme, Disappearing Post

Variant Nursery Rhyme

Hey riddle riddle, the dog and the fiddle, the cat jumped over the moon, the little cow laughed, as the dish rapped a tune with the spoon.



My Post Disappeared

My post disappeared today. This happens occassionally. I'll have to start from scratch again with more material later today. I have to redo my review of the book. Maybe Blogger got tired of me ordering books. Anyways, have a very nice day.

I'm back now after my post disappeared. I'm not going to rewrite my review of Starstrike Operation Orion by Kevin Dockery and Douglas Niles. I will say that I enjoyed reading it. It was better than the first book in the series which I reviewed a few days ago, Starstrike, Task Force Mars. I am looking forward to seeing more volumes in the series.

I spent most of my day ordering books again. I worked this Saturday. In addition to ordering social science books, I ordered some educational titles as well from Choice Magazine.

On the subway on the way home, I read Green Your Place In The New Energy Revolution by Jane Hoffman and Michael Hoffman. It is quite entertaining so far. One of my fvorite facts so far in the book is that before 1919, America was producing 50 million gallons of ethanol. Both Rudolf Diesel and Henry Ford were supporting biofuels for cars. Then prohibition struck. Pure ethanol became illegal, and had to be mixed with petroleum so people could not drink it. By the end of prohibition, petroleum had eclipsed ethanol as the fuel of choice for cars. There is a lot of very interesting information like this.

Tomorrow, I plan on writing the review for The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. There is a lot to say in the review. Some of it is about books and libraries. I think this is a quite important book.

Morning Thoughts, Afternoon Thoughts, Neil Gaiman Oracle

Discworld Librarian (from Terry Pratchett's books) , image attributed to Lokal_Profil . It reminds me of a Monty Python skit.

Morning Thoughts

I find myself starting on ordering the social science books. I guess, I just like ordering books of all kinds. On a positive note, I will be able to order A Safe and Sustainable World: the Promise of Ecological Design by John and Nancy Todd. This is something which I have wanted to read for quite a while.

I also finished reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. There are a lot of fabulous ideas in this book.

I have a stack of Publishers Weekly which I am going through to look for social science titles. Next is Kirkus Reviews, followed by Booklist. Unfortunately, most of the books I find in these reviews are not the kind of thing which I want to purchase. Review magazines have a tendency not to review series like Opposing Viewpoints, Current Controversies, or basic overviews of subjects like politics or crime.

Afternoon Thoughts

The young adult librarian gave me a selection of social science titles to check for the advanced placement class. I ordered The Nine Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court for the college bound students. I finished looking at Kirkus Reviews. There is not a whole lot more review material I am going to look at. I think the next step is to look at a few websites for recommendations. Then I will search for books by subject.

I did order a few things which I wanted to read. How to Rule the World : The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy by Mark Engler. I look forward to learning how to be on the supreme committee. It might advance my career a bit in the style of Pinkie and the Brain. I just really liked the title of this book.

The other book which I wanted to read which I ordered is A Universal History of the Destruction of Books From Ancient Sumer to Modern Day Iraq by Fernando Baez. When I get appointed to the supreme committee, I will hold a special festival in honor of this book. The fires will burn high.

Then when I get home, I will read Starstrike Operation Orion by Kevin Dockery and Douglas Niles. It will remind me of my special operatives who protect me and take me to the moon base for vacation.

Looking at too many reviews is getting to me a bit fuzzy. We have twenty cartons of books which just came in from my previous orders. They are in the storage space. Our processing clerk said they will be looked at on Monday. Opening boxes of books is kind of entertaining. I am hoping that everything which I ordered comes in accurately.

Link To Neil Gaiman Oracle:

I found this on Kalafudra's blog. Go on shake it and get an answer. Neil Gaiman is fun.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/oracle/

Monster Poem, Daily Ruminations

Deluxe Monopoly Pieces

Monster Poem

There is a monster under my bed

It helps me sleep through the night

It feeds on dreams taking my nightmares

I knowingly let it take my bad dreams

The price is contentment lack of a future

The monster smiles it lives on ordinariness

I live in the peace of the contented dead

Daily Ruminations

I have been reading more of The Long Tail on the train. It has made me think about how my library is organized. We probably need to merchandise the collection more. This will be a slow process of negotiation. I don't think it will happen immediately.

I have finished part of my order for the business books, $2000. I still have about $1000 more dollars to spend. I found enough review material and sites to order a considerable amount of newer material. I ordered The Long Tail for our collection.

Now, I am going to go back through the collection and order basic materials. I have a book in front of me called, The Basic Business Library Core Resources, 4th Edition, Edited by Rashelle S. Karp. It is an older book, but it will allow me to look for and fill gaps in our collection.

The Basic Business Library Core Resources, 4th Edition, identified another resource for me to look at. The March 15 yearly issue of Library Journal lists the best business books.

I have sorted through the last six years of the magazine to add more to my growing list of business books. It seems I will have enough room to start on a much larger order, social science books. I will be glad when the initial order of business management books is done. It takes a decent amount of time and effort.

I have been thinking a lot lately. I am working on a short essay on the concept of how a build on demand manufacturing system could be integrated with a cradle to cradle remanufacturing system. It is just an idea. I think it is possible to combine fabbing with inbuilt remanufacturing capabilities. Imagine a future with highly interchangeable reusable parts. You read these books like The Long Tail, then somehow, it mixes with the book, Cradle to Cradle, and then it mixes with Bruce Sterling's essay, Shaping Things and you get something entirely weird. It is a ghostly thought waiting to be released. This is of course all wildly speculative silliness.