Friday, June 24, 2005

The Water-Cooler Effect

With the rise of cable TV and TiVo, we're becoming a very fragmented society.
Chris is saying one rock radio station a week is closing.
And he's saying that each of us now creates our own radio station on our iPods...(which I am guilty of doing...but I do not want to give up NPR in the morning.)

What are the incentives to keep creating in the long tail environment?
Top of tail: Money making (pros) --Copyright
Middle: Moonlighting (marketing) -- No Copyright
Bottom of Tail: Freedom of Expression (amateurs) --Creative Commons License

Books
1/4 of Amazon's business are titles that are not available in bricks and mortar bookstores.

Prediction: Our children will never know the meaning of the phrase "out of print."

Amazon bought Booksurge: a Print-on-Demand company.

What about Used Books on the Long Tail?

New Technology
Firefox, Grease Monkey, Bookplug-in on Grease Monkey.
Credit to John Udell, Infoworld.
(He's describing something quite similar to Open WorldCat...)

Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance
Moving forward--the world is moving to an era of abundance.

1 comment:

Alice said...

To comment on my own post, there was a group of us chatting after the Symposium...Norman Oder of Library Journal, Karen Schneider, Elizabeth McGenty, Alane, me. And Norman was quite excited about the Firefox + GreaseMonkey biblio plug-in.

Turns out, the functionality is closer to xISBN that Open WorldCat. (Had to set the record straight for everyone!)