Obvious | Big Bend National Park, Texas | March 2009
Is it possible to experience the joy of serendipity and mystery without the costs of their inefficiencies? Can the sweet be as sweet without the sour?
A loss: Diana Kimball, Paper Houses: Vanity, Doubt, and the Perils of Self-Publishing:
Most book-buyers do not walk into bookstores, or embark upon browsing through Amazon.com, thinking about metrics of approbation and the business models of various publishing houses. They are looking for something to read.
Without paper copies of a book inundating physical stores and crowding their shelves, countless opportunities for real-world serendipity are lost. It is almost impossible to accidentally collide with a print-on-demand book, because the book would first have to be demanded. For all its astounding resource inefficiency, the publishing industry’s system of mass production is quite expert at populating shelves in enticing ways. Without admission to that physical matrix, self-published books lose out on the production of consumer desire—a production process that is mimicked, not subverted, on sites such as Amazon.com.
An opportunity: Grant McCracken, Finder’s fee and the future of publishing:
I was in my local Barnes and Noble on Sunday and I bought two books. Both of them from Amazon, online, using my iPhone while standing in the isles.
Of course I felt bad. I learned about these two books thanks to Barnes and Noble. They ought to have made the sale.
The problem was, I wanted both books in Kindle form and Barnes and Noble couldn’t help me there.
Still, it’s clear they ought to be getting a finder’s fee. As should booker reviewers, websites, magazines and other players in the stream. And it doesn’t have to be much to add up.
If Barnes and Noble were getting .25 for every book they brought to America’s attention, it would be a pretty penny.
Here’s the thing: Amazon is now engaged in a dangerous game of “winner take all.” It must see that it’s time to give BN a finder’s fee when I make my purchase. Because this bookstore created value. It instructed me in my possibilities. And it deserves to harvest this value.
Yes, Amazon tries to do this. I continue to be impressed by how badly it does it. There is no substitute for browsing, and nothing browses better than a bookstore.
Not quite: a bookstore is hardly the best way to browse for content; swimming through the rich but muddled waters of experience goods and the “eddies of disparate and unconnected thoughts” without a guide can be a monumental waste of time, a wealth of knowledge clouded by fog, locked behind dams, unnavigable without the maps and pointers of readily available trusted authorities.
But browsing online comes with its own challenges; mystified by incomplete information and clouded by too much information we regularly appeal to the heuristics, stereotypes and rules of thumb that we have created to help us make decisions offline and online.
Thus the answer isn’t to replace the bookstore but to enhance it, to combine the online and the offline experiences in “real-time” to tie together the senses and sensibilities of both worlds.
But the real question: does stripping away the inefficiency and costs of browsing and searching strip away the benefits?
Is it possible to experience serendipity and mystery without inefficiency?
(In short, yes and no; as usual, it all comes down to the balance in design and execution for disparate audiences, intents and business models. Consider that thought as we discuss platforms for organizing and distributing creative content.)
