Bill Katz

I read Chris Anderson’s the Long Tail a few months ago and kept nodding in agreement as I read point after point.¹ If you haven’t read it, take a look.² The Long Tail refers to the retail chart of sales vs. popularity, where the most popular titles sell in huge numbers and the sales figure drops asymptotically as you move out to the less popular items. Whereas a physical bookstore like Barnes & Noble might stock 130,000 books, a centralized virtual bookstore like Amazon can hold a couple million books. The less popular titles, those works not carried by B&N;, constitute the long tail.

The basic idea is that the internet changes the sales potential of lesser known works because:

• It’s cheap to warehouse and distribute out of a small number of locations, especially if its digital;
• Demand, even if its geographically unconcentrated, can be handled by an online retailer;
• Online recommendations can raise awareness of items deep in the tail.

I’ve seen #3 in effect. I recently joined an excellent online writing group, Codex, and one author received increased sales through Amazon’s “If you like this” recommendations.

It makes sense to handle less popular works because in aggregate, these works constitute a big market, particularly if the mode of distribution doesn’t erode profits. Anderson makes a compelling case and draws examples from video (Netflix), music (iTunes, Rhapsody, etc), and books (Amazon). It’s interesting that only the last type of content—books—exist primarily in non-digital copies. Anderson briefly described the potential of print-on-demand, which is really electronic warehousing that puts off physical creation until the sale, one way of moving book publishing towards the Dell-inspired sell-build-send model. But really, the written word is lagging far behind music and video when it comes to capitalizing on the long tail.

Why? Well one can always say its antiquated business models, the fear of publishers that keeps e-book prices absurdly high compared to physical books, but my experience with Audible.com suggests that cheap delivery of written words (in this case, spoken audio) is possible. I think we also have to consider the delivery device.

When I buy MP3s or an iTune, I download it to my iPod and the experience is just as good if not better than the old CDs. The quality is just as good, and I can organize my music more easily and transport my entire collection in an ultra-portable device. When I rent movies from Netflix or Blockbuster.com, I get the film digitized on a cheap piece of plastic—the DVD—which is just as good if not better than any VHS tape or cable show, and the platform will get better. Now, if I download an e-book… you get the picture. We have no rendering device for the written word that successfully competes with old-fashioned books.

Jason Epstein, an icon of the book publishing industry, has been beating the print-on-demand drum and serving on the board of 3BillionBooks, a book machine company. Other companies like ODMC are building book printers and making sure patents slow everything down.

Since this is the new year, I’ll make a prediction that print-on-demand machines won’t provide the tipping point for written words. I think it’ll be e-paper, e-ink, or some similar technology. Once words have a decent rendering system—a device that couples the advantages of books, pages, and electronic storage—we’ll see the long tail with a vengeance, because in all this analysis, we haven’t considered the cost and difficulty of content production. From most to least expensive we have:

Movies—Hollywood and big money
Videos—Creative team with expertise in acting/animating, lighting, editing, screenplay writing, etc
Music—Creative team with instruments, sound recorders, editing system, etc
Words—A writer, pen & paper, and an editor (optional)

The case is a little overstated, but the general idea holds: one of the cheapest things to make, in terms of equipment and number of paid contributors, will be the last to get a workable reader device. And when that happens, you can bet that books, magazines, and short stories will finally join the retail party at the long tail. Niches will be served, not just through free web content, but by paid electronic copies.

How to sift through all those written words and find the gems? Coming in late 2005: the second phase of Writertopia.

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¹ Chris Anderson runs The Long Tail blog, or as he puts it: a public diary on the way to a book. I’ll be first in line to buy the book.

² A slightly updated version is available through the most excellent ChangeThis.com website.