Anonymous Patron writes “On Point : The Long Tail – The Long Tail When the music rolled each week for “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s, it was a truly national American event. Nearly 75 percent of the country’s TV households gathered at the TV screen for Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo — a true mass market.
Today, television’s number-one, top-rated TV show — CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — draws just 15 percent of TV households. And Americans have scattered.
Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson says we’re going to scatter much wider still in the Internet age — down what he calls the “long tail” of highly personal interests and specialized products – via eBay and Amazon and YouTube into a new world of commerce and culture.
Hear about the end of the mass market as we’ve known it, and the way of the long tail.”
On the Media
The long tail book is currently #2 at Amazon. On a related note there was a story on the NPR show “On the Media” on June 30th that discusses the long tail and bestsellers. Worth a listen.
Turning the Page
A recent industry report showed that in 2005, book production declined for the first time since 1999, and data indicates that books are spending less time on the bestseller list. Technology-induced growing pains, to be sure. But Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired magazine, tells Brooke that the same technology that eroded the book’s clout might also be the best hope for rescuing the publishing industry.
If you scroll down at the “On the Media Page” there is an icon that lets you listen to just the story you want without having to listen to the entire one hour show.
Re:On the Media
The Long Tail is a bestseller. Based on articles in a magazine with very wide circulation–a “bestseller” that can guarantee enough circulation so that advertisers carry nearly all of the freight, since subscriptions run $1 an issue. Oh, and there’s some pirate movie or other that seems to have more than a few thousand viewers…
The Long Tail phenomenon–which librarians have known about for decades, or at least should have–no more implies the death of bestsellers than blogs imply the death of professional journalism. Even if a Wired guru says so.
Re:On the Media
Where are you getting the line about “the death of the bestseller”?
The first story that LISNEWS links to has this line, “Hear about the end of the mass market as we’ve known it, and the way of the long tail.” Does not mention the death of the bestseller.
The “On the Media” story says this:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So can you describe the study that prompted this look at publishing trends?
CLIVE THOMPSON: It was a really interesting study, because it was done by lulu.com, which is a publish-on-demand website. You send in your book and they’ll publish it when they get requests for it. And they decided to look at the fate of the bestseller over the last three or four decades, and what they found was very interesting. They saw that back in the ’60s, there were very few bestsellers, but they were on the charts for three or four months at a time, and they were big, dominant books. And you fast-forward to the ’90s and to the 2000s, and it was reversed. There are a lot of books that make it to the bestseller charts but they’re only there for a very short time, a few weeks. The inference was that the sort of age of the big, huge bestseller that dominates the national attention span for, you know, an entire season or an entire year is passing into history.
So yes, The Long Tail is a bestseller but will it be a bestseller in one month? I am not seeing that these articles or programs are claiming the death of the bestseller.
Re:On the Media
You’re right. I imputed “death of the bestseller” from “end of the mass market.” The imputation wasn’t necessarily justified. My bad. I’d dispute the “end of the mass market”; it’s still around and likely to stay that way–but not as all of the marketplace or always a majority of it.
(Of course, for magazines, sound recordings, and books, it’s been a long time since the “mass market” was the whole, or the most important part of, the marketplace. And the “long tail” didn’t require the internet, or even Wired’s imprimatur, to make that true.)