Seeing as the Bookseer is about books, and data, and openness, I thought I would share some of the early stats with those of you who are interested in such things. This is all based on the first few days’ traffic up to June 13th. (Whilst launched before then, we announced in on June 9th.) As well as being fun, I think that the data is a mild demonstration of The Long Tail in action.

Visitors

• We’ve had 19,716 page views, across 4,403 page titles, with 15,181 unique page views.
• Visits are 7,123 with uniques at 6,602. Which suggests about 10% of people asked the Book Seer for advice on more than one title. (Or, if you felt generous, 90% of people got the answer they were looking for. Personally, I’m not quite that optimistic – if that were true, then we really should have set up an affiliate account on the referrals to Amazon… although I think that violates the non-commercial terms of service on the API.)

Pages

• The home page was the most popular, but only bounced 30.5% of visits. Which seeing as much of the referred traffic was from StumbleUpon, I think is pretty good – they are hard people to entertain. Having said that I find it really hard to see what StumbleUpon has said about a site or even to find a referring link.
• There are only two pages on the site- the home page, and the results page. The results page has the name of the book written into the URL (and the title) so we can tell from the logs what books have been looked at the most. If that URL had included the ISBN or something else abstract – we wouldn’t know anything. Nice work James. As a result we can tell which titles have been the most popular requests of the seer.

Books

And so the next bit is the fun bit. We have 4,406 different page titles, and 3 of those were the home page (we collected data when the site was codenamed “My Next Book”). All the other 4,403 are questions for the seer.

Here’s the top 20 – and it provides a fun overview of people’s reading habits. Note that some – not all – results are skewed by the fact that bloggers linking to the bookseer linked directly to a results page. So Stumbleupon appears to have linked directly to the Dave Eggers, What is the What page, a link which resulted in 166 of the 269 page views for that title. Still, What is the What remains a popular book among people who come to consult the Bookseer – or, looked at another way, one that people in aggregate find particularly hard to follow up to.

Top 20

Note that the links in the list below are ones I have made on the title only. Requests for an author only (e.g. Dave Eggers, without “What is the What”) are met with a demand for better information.

1. The Book Seer | What Is The What- 269 [This is slightly unfair as it is one of the pages linked to by StumbleUpon)
2. The Book Seer | Twilight - 116
3. The Book Seer | Harry Potter 74 [Note - Librarything has a lot of problems with this request]
4. The Book Seer | 1984
5. The Book Seer | The Road 55
6. The Book Seer | Neuromancer 52
7. The Book Seer | Atlas Shrugged 30
8. The Book Seer | Pride And Prejudice 27
9. The Book Seer | The Bible 26 [some great left-field recommendations for that]
10. The Book Seer | Outliers 24
11. The Book Seer | Enders Game 23
12. The Book Seer | On The Road 23 [Note the difficulty Amazon has compared to Librarything when no author is entered]
13. The Book Seer | The Catcher In The Rye 22
14. The Book Seer | ウェブ進化論 22 [No idea, sorry, but from the recommendations, looks pretty cool]
15. The Book Seer | Infinite Jest 21
16. The Book Seer | The Secret History19
17. The Book Seer | The Stand 19
18. The Book Seer | American Gods
19. The Book Seer | The Book Thief 18
20. The Book Seer | Catcher In The Rye 17

Whilst the top 20 is interesting, what I love is that the full list of titles is so broad. The vast majority of books only get one search on them; the bottom of the list is Q E D.

Titles 4000-4015 in the Bookseer list

Observations

• I think this is pretty cool, although I don’t know why. Taking aside Neuromancer – James’ test title – is it a really interesting zeitgeist of what people are reading? Or their favourite books? Or the books they find hardest to followup? Or the first book that comes to mind? Twilight, Harry Potter – OK, these may demonstrate a paucity of imagination as much as they show a teenage visitor set. But Infinite Jest?, What is The What? Atlas Shrugged? The Road? Whilst in the news, these aren’t exactly bestsellers. When Russell* linked to Rogue Male, I think the favourites is a good guess.
• Oops. We should probably strip out “The”, “A” and other prefixes to avoid duplicates such as [The] Catcher In The Rye.
• The Bookseer works much more accurately if you put in an author as well as a title, although James does a lot of clever things in the background (stuff learned from projects such as Bkkeepr for a start) to make up the difference.
• LibraryThing handles “title only” requests much better than Amazon. Amazon gets confused by “The Bible”, or rather, the number of titles in its database that include “The Bible”.
• LibraryThing gets confused quite often. Sorry Tim – do get in touch if we can find better ways to do this, or to query Unsuggester items (although part of me thinks the beauty here is in the simplicity).

And finally apologies to anyone using Internet Explorer 6 (and to my horror, this includes about 3.5% of visits and several large UK publishers) – you may have issues. Not sure what that says – we tried really hard to support you.

Visit the Bookseer

* [Russell - I'm with you. I recently re-read Rogue Male and loved it. I also gave my copy to David Simon, fan boy-style, because I read that he is apparently making a film based on Man Hunt, the Fritz Lang movie based on RM. He hadn't heard of the book, and wasn't very impressed by my gift.]

Where is all this leading? As these book sites get bigger they will suddenly realise the leverage that their members have given them. It is not completely fanciful to speculate that they could use their huge user bases to negotiate for cheaper books directly with the publishers rather than intermediaries. Watch out, Amazon.

It’s a new online chapter for books, Guardian Technology.

I’ve always been more loyal to LibraryThing than any of the other book cataloguing sites such as Shelfari, BookTribes (and the others I mentioned a year ago).

Why? I don’t know. There was something about the potential of LibraryThing – that it was kind of homespun, badly designed, had an authentic, passionate and DIY voice that was much less ‘polished’ (read: invested in) than the others. It got very exciting when the site was growing about this time last year – as the thing that makes these sites a success is the sheer number of books catalogued on them

The potential for me was the ability to do what AbeBooks.com is now doing – to tie it in to a recommendation system on a pre-existing ecommerce platform. And for my part, I wanted in on it so that it’s data could be used as part of the ultimate publishing / booksale web site that I have in my head.

But, it still looks really geeky, has some pretty obscure icons and buttons and lots of library-esque codes and numberings that Perec would be proud of. Come on LT, invest in some good design and usability! The social aspects of the site – which Tim (the owner) has always played down almost as an embarassed feature of “web 2.0″ sites – are now common enough currency online to not be a gimmick – and I think this is the nettle LT should now grasp.

I digress. The question is whether the book cataloguing / social netwoek ‘market’ can support so many different sites, which (like any social network / catalog / recommendation system) depend on volume to become more accurate / relevant . In the same way that music has Last.FM, and Pandora to recommend music to us, books are now served by a number of sites – but it may be a matter of time before they join forces. It would be bad if the market became swamped, fragmented, and drowned itself in choice.

One site I hadn’t seen before is aNobii (which ticks all the web 2.0 design boxes, but is maybe a little mulit-lingual to be friendly). But to check that LibraryThing still cuts the mustard, I’m going to run a quick test against Karoo – my favourite book – and see what each comes up with.

Karoo on:

Librarything (which, tellingly, comes up ranked 7 on a google search for Karoo Steve Tesich)
Anobii
Shelfari
Reader2
(hmm!)
Booktribes

What does this tell us? LibraryThing has the scale and data to contribute to an AbeBooks search in a meaningful way. When the bookhints (as Abe are calling the LT data) is added to a Karoo search we do get some data, but it’s (again) pretty horribly presented, and doesn’t seem like so much of a big deal – more of a cheap Amazon “Other people bought…” feature with fraggier jackets.

Anyway, my guess is that these sites will continue to grow in popularity (especially with coverage such as in the NYT at the weekend) but that these sites, including LibraryThing, have got a long way to go before delivering on their potential, andproviding a one-stop recommendation / cataloguing site that really drives sales. I’ve never really got Abe, so knowing if they are actually the right partner to leverage the LT data is a tough call.

As a disclaimer, we are kind of talking at cross purposes: Alex is not a LT user, and his reference is to the (heavily-blogged) Netflix prize to improve their recommendation engine. So he’s coming at it all from a very conceptual level. Anyway.

Peter,
just read your blog about Librarything. You might be interested in this story that was on slashdot recently:-

Will be interesting to see what comes out of it and whether or not it is
applicable to different domains (ie books rather than movies)

A

Thanks for this – you should comment on the blog as well as emailing.

I saw this post earlier this week – it’s been quite heavily blogged and although I haven’t read all the /. stuff (I don’t eat that feed) the summary that i’ve read seems quite fairly to be “if they’d open it up as an API before, then they could have got this for free and saved a million)” and then some. But that at the same time it’s great publicitiy for them. And I didn’t really feel I had much to add to that – its true.

thanks for your interest though – keep em coming!

P

I disagree – a public API is a relatively expensive thing in terms of network overhead in invoking calls. ie if I want to invoke foo() via an XML / RPC /
AJAX whatever call then the amount of time that it takes to run foo() on the
central server is microscopic compared with the time that it takes to deliver
the request for foo() to the server and send the results of foo() back to the
client.

Therefore you would tend to use an API for something which has a relatively
low number of calls for a given task thereby making it run in a feasible
time.

Now, designing a recommendation schema is the kind of thing which will involve
millions of calls during the development process while you decide what sort
of questions are useful ones to ask. It is this development process that
netflix are inviting people to do, and providing the dataset to them (the
public developers) enables them to run these test queries against a local
dataset (and in fact to choose how the local dataset is going to be stored /
cross-referenced). Once you have a set of queries and a backend
implementation to run them against that really works, then you can export
that as a public API, but to make an API beforehand makes no sense at all.

A

i might just copy and paste that on a few of the blogs so i sound very very smart. you’re ok with that, right? ;)

Had you checked out LT?

P

Post away – of course providing you don’t complain if someone shoots you down in
flames… ;-)

I’ve had a quick scout around LT but not enough to get a concrete idea. Does
sound interesting though. The recommendations are coming from 3rd party
APIs, not from his own code though?

A

it’s social. users add books to their collection (via an API to amazon, etc). LT compares collections and draws comparisons. genius.

P

P

its not that simple – if it was then netflix wouldn’t be offering 10^6 for
people to solve it.

you have the ability to rate books so you can use this to skew the
distributions between how much people like things and perform better matching
than just who shares the same collection.

however, people don’t rate things in similar ways. Someone who has 100 books
all of which are rated at 5 stars doesn’t make the recommendation as strong
for a particular book as someone who has an average weighting of 3 stars for
another 100 books and has labelled one book at 5 stars.

So you have to perform various normalisation things on people’s data-sets to
try and compensate for the different ways that people interpret their
collections.

The trouble is that this only really works across large data-sets, and the set
logic on this kind of thing gets exponentially more complex as you start to
perform more bespoke queries.

So, while it may be possible to perform relatively complex analysis given
enough time, being able to do it “on-demand” across a large data-set (library
thing has only 87,221 members at present and some of the queries can take up
to a minute to process) is non-trivial.

It probably comes down to finding a nice search that works well and then
refactoring it into something that will slot into google’s map/reduce
algorithm (ie will scale well across a parallel architecture rather than
demanding a single high capacity processor for long periods of time).

Its not that librarything isn’t very interesting and very good, but they
definitely haven’t solved what netflix want to solve. What they are good at
is persuading people to provide content (which is solved by the netflix
rental history).

I’ve been doing loads of work / research on the high-end scalability issues
and its a real fucker, especially as the data-set grows.

One thing that just occurred to me is that trust metrics are quite interesting
for this kind of thing – ie some people’s recommendations might be more
trusted just because of who they are and their past behaviour – kind of guru
status. The first people I saw looking at this was
advogato, although slashdot have done very
well in terms of their moderation and meta-moderation (although this is a
slightly different problem).

An ideal system would let people rank the recommendations that it gives them
and try and mutate the recommendation algorithm until it suits what one
person wants it to be: ie the recommendations that I think are best based on
books A,B & C might be completely different from what you think are best
based on exactly the same books. Neither sets are wrong in themselves, only
wrong given the situation. Urg. All very non-trivial (but quite a lot of
fun)

A

i’m so posting this thread. seriously.

OK, LT and NF are separate issues. I don’t think an LT type approach would solve NF at all, I just like it as a book web site.

But yes, it uses recommendations – programmatic ones at that. The recommendations are based on your collection – ratings don’t seem to come into it (afaik). You should check it out with 10 of your favourite books and see what it comes back with.

The thing is, it’s not supposed to do this – it’s supposed to be a bibiliographic service of collecting books; recommendation is a by-product. Although we’ll see how it develops.

My concern when Abe bought into LT was that data from booksellers would ‘pollute’ the integrity of users collections (user collections being based on taste, bookshops being based on the market).

p

It is is the connections that LT draws, that raises it from being just a lot
of information, to being a lot of relevant information. (To you). Infinitely more valuable and interesting.

I’ll populate it a bit on my return to UK – juggling a bit at the moment.

It does to a little bit of semi-clever analysis like so:-

- go to user profile: eg

- RHS has “users with sylphette’s books”. At the base level this is people
who just share common books with sylphette and is relatively easy to build
and hence fast. However, if I have 2000 books and you have 100 books and it
happens that I have all 100 of your books then it doesn’t mean that you will
like all of my 2000 books.
meburste (494),
debweiss (474),
ellenandjim (468),
eromsted (442),
ginaruiz (374),
chanale (371),
carminowe (367),
vernonlee (357),
obsessedbybooks (357),
lennonj (357),

- RHS has option for “weighted” listing for Users listing. You click this and
it says “This information is loading. Loading may take as much as a minute
if it hasn’t been updated recently” and then it returns a new list. During
this time period presumably their server is churning and the load is on
maximum so the more people that are doing it at the same time, the longer it
takes. If then gives you:-
(Weighted by book obscurity and library size)
famousgoodbyeking (120/401),
chanale (421/4448),
paulvm (57/323),
cinaedus (102/1082),
wellred2 (275/2699),
popa (345/5727),
apeejam (50/99),
vernonlee (366/3171),
gregsanchez (159/1224),
dustinfr (192/503),
meburste (539/6000)
Interestingly meburste has now dropped from 1 to 10. So it turns out that
meburste just has a large library but actually they don’t overlap all that
much. paulvm wasn’t even in the top 10 on the basic listing (or in fact in
the listing at all) because he had a small library and therefore couldn’t
overlap that much.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that people with big libraries are
considerably less useful than people who only buy (or upload) books that they
really love. ie if everyone puts up their top 100 books then the the
overlaps would be much more important because it would automatically discard
background noise (ie books that you just have but which aren’t super relevant
to you).

This would be solved by the rating system as it would then give you a
weighting that would automatically look at how much you *care* about the
books rather than just the fact that you have uploaded it. Cross-referencing
this with tags makes it even more interesting. But *very* *very*
computationally expensive.

definitely – most interesting.

This is a field that I’ve always been interested in – I spent some time
working on automatic classification of text documents based around word
distributions and statistical analysis with learning systems so I’ve thought
about this quite a lot. I also have a very nice book of papers on Automatic
Text Summarisation Systems that has a lot of overlap with some of these
problems (ie if you can work out what something is about automatically and
consistently then you can get a consistent classification thereby making it
easier to compare – tagging is always going to be personal and therefore
means a different thing to each user, much like the rating systems mentioned
above).

WRT the ‘poillution’ – that can then be introduced as a weighting into the algorithm as well – ie the source of the data becomes important as well as everything else.

Remember that for some tasks commercial data is more important than user data and vice versa. Again, another dimension of complexity to the argument…

Wrong. Abe will (and indeed, reading beyond the headline, is) be using the data collected by Librarything to create better recommendations. What does this mean? Librarything allows users to catalogue their books, and to create virtual libraries. As the data in these libraries is centralised, LibraryThing then has fun running comparisons across the data sets, and drawing conclusions about one user’s taste based on all other user’s taste. So, if I’ve read All’s Fair and Big If, then LibraryThing knows that OK, I may be a security risk to the US President, but that I may also enjoy The Testament of Yves Gundrun (which, actually, I acquired for Canongate years ago). And that’s pretty cool.

What makes it different to Amazon’s ‘people who shopped for’ or ‘people who bought’ is that it is based on book reading rather than shopping. It’s based on passion and taste. And that’s what makes it valuable.

LibraryThing is the purest example of ‘collaborative filtering’, i.e. using other people to (jargon alert) recommend stuff they like to you from the ‘long tail’ or millions of products. It doesn’t make these decisions based on newness, press coverage or bestseller status: it is probably more likely to recommend a book that was published years ago than last week. Which means it is meritocratic, personal and extremely valuable.

Abe are doing a very smart thing here and it will give them an edge. It is exactly how they should leverage their stake in LibraryThing, and what is cool about it is that Amazon can’t compete with it, and whilst publishers should be able to they can’t either.

This is very exciting and I can’t wait to see how it pans out. The only odd thing is the marriage with Abe: it is surely a better fit with Amazon. Who knows, maybe where this is going will lead to Abe moving more into focus on Amazon’s acquisition radar. If they can nail how to get people to buy more books that they enjoy more, Amazon doesn’t care if they are new or second hand. On paper, it could be the holy grail…

Design Observer has a nice post about cataloguing books (at least in the pre-Librarything era). Arguing about Melville Dewey (father of the bibliographic taxonomy most publishers I hope hate) versus Georges Perec may seem a little, um specialised:

Perec lists several possible ordering schemes in his essay, and in practice I have used a number of these, sometimes alone and sometimes in combination with one another. Randomness (or chance) has dominated certain shelves of mine for a while. Loose categories governed by architectural constraints was a working method of mine, too, with a large wall grouping my novels and a side table sheltering the smattering of books I have on the dramatic arts. Sometimes the size of the books themselves is the governing agent: I have ganged up a set of cheap paperbacks on a squat shelf because they fit there splendidly. A book’s value can govern my placement of it: for example, I keep my expensive books away from the sun. In other cases, time is the reason for a book’s placement, with older books piling up a dark corner of my studio while newer books are proudly displayed on my coffee table. (Though there is some method to my madness, I still take solace in Terry Belanger’s aptly-named Lunacy and the Arrangement of Books, which profiles several of my predecessors.) The central issue, as Perec warms us, is that “None of these classifications systems is satisfactory by itself,” and he is right. But one idea from his list, “ordering by color,” seems to be gathering a small following of late, particularly among the visually-inclined.

but it’s still kind of fun, especially when you get to look at the pictures:

Lots of light (and not so light – Adorno is included) links from the article for further reading.

I have to admit to a mild OCD when it comes to paperbacks, or at least those within a series, and arrangement by colour. And, possibly, size. As my LibraryThing profile attests, there’s a row of old Tsichshold era Penguins, including some omnific Pelicans and the first editions of Pelicans 1-5; another of Rebel Inc Classics, one of my favourite series designs of modern times, by Angus Hyland, a ‘black’ row of 80s/90s Penguin classics, original first-edition Rebel Incs, and everything else mulched up into one. And that’s just in the wall by my desk at home.

Something else to add here is that the great film One Hour Photo (implausibly starring Robin Williams as a borderline psycho), directed by promo director Mark Romanek took a similar, colour coded view to supermarkets. When I saw the film at EIFF three or four years ago, I was delighted by the art direction of the supermarkets, with typographical restraint and colour coded shelves:

The article ends,

So, will Pantone’s numbers replace Dewey’s decimals anytime soon? Probably not. But don’t let that discourage you. To rearrange your books is to see them afresh and to investigage yourself in the process. Even if you make a terrible mess, Perec reminds us that “Disorder in a library is not serious in itself; it ranks with ‘Which drawer did I put my socks in?’” and your sock drawer is probably color-coded already.

Having seen the power of songs to promote TV shows, movies and even videogames, publishers and authors are increasingly experimenting with soundtracks for books. Writers like James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Lemony Snicket are giving out CDs with copies of their novels. Others, like Bret Easton Ellis, are posting music suggestions on Web sites, blogs such as Largehearted Boy (and his weekly “Book Notes” feature) or MySpace pages. In many cases, the soundtracks are aimed at appealing to younger readers.

“Publishers are really struggling with the idea of, ‘How are we going to get 16-year-old kids to read, when it’s tough to get them to even watch TV,’” says Chuck Klosterman, who has posted a playlist on the Web for his recent book, “Killing Yourself to Live.” To accompany the book about his pilgrimage to the sites of famous music-related deaths, he chose songs by the Sex Pistols and Nirvana

Not sure I haven’t mentioned this before, or probably read about it elsewhere, but the idea of an extended LibraryThing / LastFM mashup to include music would create an interesting cross-section between music and books, or films, TB shows and so on. Not sure what good it would do other than be mildly distractng though.

This does remind me of one of my favourite CDs of all time. Andrew Vachss, a (very) hard-boiled crime author with a series of detective novels with the character Burke. Burke is insane for obscure blues, and Vachss (combined with his pretty scary manager/agent Lou Banks, and their aptly-named company Ten Angry Pitbulls) put together an awesome CD of the music for one of the novels, Safe House. Buy it.

She’s pretty controversial, mainly among those who either used to work for her (she was unceremoniously fired) or who didn’t like her style. But she does say some interesting things on publishing, and in general on how to manage technologial change in an industry.

What else did I listen to that’s worth catching? The CEO of Thomas Nelson talks about how to use a blog for internal and external communications. It’s not for the wildly experienced, although it does have some clear messages, but as an overview for publishers’, it’s spot on.

I caught another Michael Cader interview, this time from Nigel Beale, who manages to be slightly less self-serving this time. Cader says some smart things about how publishers should use the web. No-brainers, again, but these things need to be said.

There’s a good, old, talk by Jeff Bezos at the O’Reilly web 2.0 conference.

I’ve got cued up the last of the BEA talks, including Amazon’s Greg Greeley, which was the one I was most excited about hearing before I got distracted by the others. I also have a LibraryThing ‘mashup‘ which I have no idea if it will be interesting or not. And another Chris Anderson piece from Instapundit.

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.

This is very exciting as the concept behind the book is very relevant to publishing, and I blogged about Chris before I even knew we would be involved in this. Clearly it’s a great book for us to get involved in. But even more so, the promo is going to be brilliant.

I finished the book on holiday, and will blog about it in more detail, but wanted to mention a couple of points given the profile the book is currently getting.

My first point is that I think the LT is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the current business / new media landscape. It’s actually a fairly complex idea, and difficult to ‘pitch’, as we found when trying to write the script for a 30 second ad. But importantly, it’s one which is commonly understood to mean something other than what it actually is.

The prevailing interpretation of the LT is that it is going to mean that (for publishers) all the crap you’ve been paying to sit in warehouses will magically sell in vast amounts at full price now that the LT has been identified as an idea. That, suddenly, all of your audiences will be magically ‘aggregated’ and will purchase your entire stock. I’m only just exaggerating.

Similarly, for authors (or musicians, film makers etc) it is as if a panacea has been created to free up your distribution problems and make you a mint.

Neither is true.

My reading of the LT was as an articulation of internet economics for the big boys. The winners in Long Tail economics are the aggregators who can pull in the huge audiences, sell millions of products to them, and have the required volume (and margins) to make this work. And this is a handful of operations – we’re talking Amazon, iTunes, eBay, and as the book states, Netflix, Rhapsody (which I’ve never before heard of or used).

The book also mentions Google as the Long Tail of advertising – which is of course true: Adwords is connecting advertisers to consumers and getting paid to do so. Additionally, I’ve blogged before now about LibraryThing and how that is in some ways a potentially marvellous articulation of Long Tail economics mixed with word of mouth, although clearly LibraryThing is not yet operating on those levels as a business, depending on subscriptions rather than cuts on individual sales. But now that Abe has taken a stake, who knows? Second hand book sales, and aggregated ones at that, are classic Long Tail markets, and the book highlights Alibris.

So, to be a successful LT retailer / aggregator you need to have huge market share (Amazon and iTunes both win there), low ongoing costs – ideally with digitised stock and distribution, or outsourcing the distribution to the producer (as eBay and Amazon marketplace do) and great profile among customers.

Therefore, setting up a ‘Long Tail’ business will be increasingly difficult as the ‘niche’ market will fragment, and customer acquisition will become more expensive – no doubt driving competition among ‘niche’ retailers, lowering prices and threatening the validity of the model itself. Anyway, I digress.

Of course, in the current setup, publishers won’t benefit from this significantly. The won’t (contrary to received wisdom – see above) suddenly start shifting stock from their websites in large volumes, although if they had well-structured, well-indexed and high-ranking web sites with extracts and good incentives to buy, they’d be doing a lot better. (More on this anon)

So how do publishers leverage the Long Tail? Can they? Ironically, I think the answer lies with Google, an idea that I have mooted before, and which comes into sharper focus in LT economics.

It is of course Google Print / Book Search. When Google has indexed all of the books, and has the ability to sell off the page, then it should provide the aggregation tools for the biggest and longest tail ever. Based on my above criteria, it has massive market share for search – and when books are fully integrated, even more so. It has very low costs beyond the indexing, which it is gobbling up, and the transactions will be outsourced to the publisher, Amazon, or possible their own system. But to be sure, particularly in non-fiction, the ability to do a google search on an obscure topic, and to find a book or set of books related to that search, has to be a pure articulation of the long tail in action?

More on the promo very, very soon…

Update: The promo will be released very shortly – watch this space.

Another Update: Obviously Google stuffed up with the whole publisher relationship thing. Had they not come swinging into town riding roughshod over things like copyright and the fact that publishers are a little protective about such things, terrified of piracy, and shall we say, sometimes not the earliest of adopters, then this would have been a great idea. It still is a great idea, but it’s going to be an uphill battle for a long time. I think it was Jane Friedmann who recently said that she didn’t expect the google issue to be resolved in the courts in her lifetime….