25/07/06
July Emissions
None of these is necessarily fresh, but came up in my scouring of what had been happening whilst I was away.
The Wrong Tail. Slate takes a pop at the LT’s theory of everything.
What are the Long Tail’s limits? As a business model, it matters most 1) where the price of carrying additional inventory approaches zero and 2) where consumers have strong and heterogeneous preferences. When these two conditions are satisfied, a company can radically enlarge its inventory and make money raking in the niche demand. This is the lifeblood of a handful of products and companies, Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, and Google among them, all of which are basically in the business of aggregating content. It doesn’t cost much to add another song to iTunes—having 10,000 songs available costs about the same as having 1 million
Which is what I was trying to say in my previous post: we don’t need a long tail of flour. This isn’t the last we’ll be hearing on this, I’m sure.
One of the things I was railing at Macmillan for was that on their site, a user has to go through a very lengthy subscription process to be able to purchase a book. Not a great idea, IMHO. Well, good old LibraryThing has a blog posting from Abby about much the same on one of their competitors’ sites. She gets so worked up about it she does some research which leads to the following stats.
ccording to Alexa, they are–today–the 6,834th most-visited websites on the entire web, around the highest LibraryThing’s been. The site looks inviting, attractive and usable. It surely took a lot of skill and effort to make.
But look at how many books have been added—230! That’s the worst conversion I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to turn Alexa numbers into raw traffic, but Alexa 6000 is a fire hose. To get 230 books out of that is a disaster of Biblical proportions.
Surely the sign-up page is to blame. It’s an object-lesson in how to wreck a website’s chances.
Why does a book-swapping service need to know my gender? (Is there dating involved?) And my birth date?* And—good grief—my PHONE NUMBER?
Time magazine wonders where the voices of our generation are. At length. Whilst citing lots of them.
I’m not adding anything to the Friendster Patent win. Just noting for my memory.
Deloitte report on digital publishing. “Digital publishing is delivering returns, with leading digital publishers predicting that by 2012 digital activities will contribute up to 40% of revenues. This is according to a report launched today by Deloitte, the business advisory firm, and the UK Association of Online Publishers (AOP) in a survey of UK publishers.” PDF
Which leads almost neatly onto the British Library’s senior archive manager about the problems of archiving digitised information.
And when you move into the scientific, technical and medical arena, you’re dealing with databases. So a journal article won’t just be something in print between covers; increasingly it will be something electronic with links through to remote databases. To collect, store and make available that kind of research for future use is very complicated.”
The Guardian covers what’s happening with the Google Print programme. Between that and their blog piece on the Long Tail, which got kind of savaged, and the whole future of books being through promos, I almost have to worry about the Guardian taking its eye off the ball.
At the same time, they have a story on the creeper effect of Audible sales of MP3 versions of books actually making some money for publishers. [Dim and distant: when I was at Cannogate I tried soo hard to get this going with MP3Lit.com. But now every time I go there I get a different landing page… sigh]
Just for laughs. The awful trailer for Londonstani.
Boyd Tonkin goes long tail. And uses the word ‘utopian’.
The economist unveils viral marketing
The times publishes a guide to the bleedin’ obvious for marketing a book about the libertines. Funny that no publisher has yet managed to really ‘do’ MySpace, but as soon as one do they’ll be touted as ground-breaking.
The NYTimes had a piece about the ‘greying of the record store’ - how the kids are staying away from even the hippest record shops which are instead catering to oldies. This is clearly going to happen to books. Although the flip side, in both cases, which the NYT doesn’t talk about, is the fetishisation of vinyl and its saturation of the DJ market, which I think will happen to books (particualrly old or even hardbacks). I think when we do see adoption of eBooks, production values will becoming increasingly valuable. Oh. I’m repeating myself. Sorry.
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