Over the holidays, I was talking about the Amazon Kindle with a friend of mine who’s working on a graduate program in writing and publishing. She and I are both avid readers, but our tastes tend towards things that are fairly obscure, even within the already-obscure genres of science fiction and fantasy. The books we’re interested in are pretty far down what has come to be known as the Long Tail.
The benefits of Internet distribution and exposure to products in the long tail are fairly well-known. A little while back, TorrentFreak had an article about Paulo Coelho, who’s managed to boost sales of foreign translations of his book spectacularly by providing free access online. The Baen Free Library is another great example, as are Girl Genius and Nothing Better. Tor has recently started offering weekly free un-DRM’d PDF downloads of books from their catalogue.
I’m going to focus on something else specifically: sharing. I like talking with friends about entertainment I’ve enjoyed, particularly books. Going over the plot, appreciating pivotal moments, examining our favourite characters, and nerding out over technique is a lot of fun. This is pretty hard to do if they haven’t read the books in question. One can always try to meet people who’ve read the same books, and online discussion groups are great for that, but it’s still not quite the same. So for a while now, I’ve been sharing books with my friends. Obscure stuff, stuff that they wouldn’t normally have read, or would’ve had a hard time finding in a bookstore even if they had wanted to.
Of course, most of them just read the book and go “Yeah, that was nifty”, and we talk about it a bit and that’s that. But for some of them - usually others with “long tail” interests, particularly others that also share - it translates into purchases. Either they buy a copy of the book that they’ve just read, or they buy the author’s next book, or they track down other books from that author and buy them.
I think this is interesting for three reasons:
- It’s the same kind of action as “normal” Long Tail Internet-enabled activity - making a product available to a potential customer for free, and seeing an eventual sale as a result. This isn’t anything new. What is new and different, and worthy of note, is that it isn’t the “owner”, the person who’s “allowed” to “give it away” by copyright law, doing the free redistribution. In practice, this is allowed either implicitly or explicitly by most (but not all) Long Tail creators, but I haven’t seen it get a lot of coverage, much less the kind of “front page” coverage “free official downloads” get. Yet I think it’s more important than “free official downloads”.
- A lot of digital content devices and services - the Amazon Kindle, Apple’s iPods and iTMS, Nintendo’s Wii, even Microsoft’s supposedly share-friendly Zune - go out of their way to prohibit or restrict user-to-user sharing. This is an unfortunately common attitude, even in places where the creators should know better (IE, webcomics), and I think it misses the entire point of the Long Tail. These creators are trying to give away power and keep it simultaneously, which, as any follower of the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan knows, you can’t do unless you’re dead.
- I think it’s a powerful sales driver, for the same reason word of mouth marketing is: the personal element. It’s not some random talking head or distant web site that’s recommending the book, it’s one of your friends.
- Discussing and analysing culture is an important cultural activity, particularly for creators. If a couple of creators (or aspiring creators, or even interested amateurs) can’t get together and pick apart a work, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to learn from that work. While this might be in the interest of control-obsessed publishers and distributors, it’s most certainly not in the best interests of creators or the public. With a culture that’s moving farther and farther down the Long Tail, sharing becomes an important prerequisite to this discussion and analysis.
- It’s not even fair use. Sharing of a book falls under the Doctrine of First Sale. I’ve paid for your book, I have a right to lend it to friends. More often than not, modern digital content technology tries to take away this right. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people were even aware that it is a right. But it is, and we should be doing our best to defend it.
So, in closing, sharing is good for creators, good for audiences, and even good for publishers (more sales!) and should be promoted and encouraged. Most digital content methods are doing their best to prevent it and eliminate it, which is exactly the wrong approach. The people developing these devices, applications, and services that handle digital content should be making sharing content easier, making paying for shared content easier, and do their best to find and promote creators that recognize the strength of sharing.