You can’t beat e-books for Long Tail potential.
Hard drives cost well under $1 a gig–perhaps in the area of 60 cents, retail–and each gig can hold at least 1,000 typical novels in a reasonably compact format.
E-book publishers would do well to avoid a best-sell fixation. It prevents many p-books from even being published if they aren’t seen as having BS potential.
As expected, I myself am enjoying a translation of Death and the Penguin (Amazon rank 508,983 in the book category).
With that in mind, I was pleased to run across The Long Tail of Books in LibraryStuff, Steven Cohen’s blog:
In an article in the Denver Post, David Milofsky writes about the Lit Blog Co-op and their vision:
“Dan Wickett, proprietor of the Emerging Writers Network, who selected Garner, adds that the LBC is committed to ‘books and authors that aren’t getting big advertising budgets or reviews but are of excellent quality. We tend to concentrate on unknown or established writers who haven’t gotten enough attention previously.'”
“You might call the LBC the anti-Oprah, and it goes without saying that the authors they select aren’t necessarily going to be showing up on the morning interview shows. Even finding the books in your local bookstore can be a challenge. There is no question that taken together they are an interesting and eclectic group. Wickett, for example, though by no means typical, is a story in himself.”
Writing about the long tail of books is important in our culture, where the popular writers get more popular (and richer) with every manuscript they finish, even if the books they write are atrocious (See J.K. Rowling). Media frenzy around books is great (much better than sports and reality “television” shows), and Oprah helps, but we need to do more to get books out to the public that aren’t bestsellers. Sure, give them what they want (please), but also try to educate your users on other (most of the time better) alternative books. Buy books from independent and academic publishers (see Newpages, Bookslut, LBC, and the hundreds of litblogs out there for inspiration).
I might get some flack for this, but libraries (public) are still 85% about books. Let’s start acting like it.
Hey, Steve, I especially like the last part. See an aside toward the end of an earlier TeleBlog post–mentioning the danger of videos and audios siphoning too much money away from books.
Detail: No, that’s not the cover of the edition on sale at Amazon. What a shame. I like it so much better.
