As much as I’d like to stop mentioning eBooks, I don’t see how you could write an essay as Rachel Donadio did in today’s New York Times Book Review without so much as mentioning them while lamenting the ability of the publishing industry to latch onto the Long Tail.
If you’re unfamiliar with the tale of the Long Tail, it’s the subject of a bestselling book by Wired editor Chris Anderson that theorizes businesses, particularly those online, can profit as tidily by selling lots of second-tier items as they can a handful of blockbusters. iTunes and Netflix are examples of this trend; they stock loads of unpopular or obscure items for little or no warehouse space. They make money off stuff that otherwise would be unavailable or catching dust in a brick-and-mortar store.
Donadio writes that book publishers haven’t figured out how to capitalize on the Long Tail because books take up too much physical space; it’s impractical to keep thousands of low-selling titles in a warehouse. She even quotes a Scribner publisher as saying the Long Tail would only work by employing “some kind of print-on-demand,” a costly and imperfect technology.
Maybe I’m missing some fine point of Economics 101, but wouldn’t it make sense to start selling books electronically for publishers to capitalize on this trend and open their back catalogs to moneymaking? I was under the impression juggernauts like Amazon and Google were already busy scanning and otherwise digitizing books for online viewing and searches, so it seems a practical extension to put those works in a format consumers can purchase and read on their iPods, Palms, PSPs or whatever the next great all-in-one portable media device is going to be.
I love books but aren’t they destined for extinction? Music has gone 100% digital triumphantly and movies are headed that way, with DVDs doomed for replacement by downloadable versions and all-digital on-demand services. I find it hard to believe publishing houses aren’t gunning to go digital, maybe at least with their back catalogs, and leave behind the expense, impracticality and storage demands of printing things on pulped trees.