 A revolutionary new economic theory says that the digital future is one of abundance—when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand disappear and everything becomes available to everyone. How will libraries fit in?
By Tom Storey
Each month, 3 million people order 21 million movies from NetFlix, an Internet, rent-by-mail DVD movie service, according to USNews.com. About 4 million users download more than 12 million songs from the Apple iTunes digital jukebox says CNet News.
Each day, users do more than 150 million searches on Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN and other Internet search engines, according to SearchEngineWatch.com. About 31 million go to Amazon.com, and another 42 million visit Ask Jeeves based on estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and Red Herring.
Conversely, network television audience share has fallen 33 percent over the last 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research. Radio listenership is at a 27-year low based on data from Duncan’s American Radio. Newspaper circulation, which peaked in 1987, continues to tumble, dropping 2 percent over the last six months, the Audit Bureau of Circulations says. Total magazine circulation has dropped to 1994 levels. And music CD sales are down 21 percent from their high in 1999.
These numbers suggest a profound transformation is taking place in the way people research, learn, entertain themselves and find things out in a networked environment. Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief at Wired Magazine, noted many of these trends in his seminal article, “The Long Tail,” which has struck a chord in technology and media circles. The Long Tail is Anderson’s business model for
the digital age. It argues that the Web has started a complete revolution in the movie, book and music businesses.
Basically, The Long Tail says that big changes are in store—in fact, already taking place—as a new digital media and entertainment economy emerges. Digitization and e-delivery are radically changing economic fundamentals and creating new markets for millions of niche items. No longer are megahits, blockbusters and best-sellers designed for mass audiences the Holy Grail to success
and riches. The digital environment, with its low storage and distribution costs, offers a viable alternative: aggregate the obscure and unpopular with the popular and widely celebrated using an automated recommendation system to link the two.
 The new economy is one based on abundance, infinite availability and unlimited shelf space and is driving Internet companies like Amazon and iTunes and NetFlix. They use personalization features and software filters—the user recommendations that say “users that like this item also like”—to help users move from the popular to the obscure in the tail of abundance.
What makes Mr. Anderson’s theory compelling is that it is the antithesis of traditional thinking, which
focuses on squeezing millions from megahits—the 20 percent of books or movies or music that are the most popular and, until now, the most profitable, supplying 80 percent of revenues. The traditional model was based on the scarcity of resources, high marketing and promotion costs, and the need to attract a large, local audience. Anderson’s article is available at Wired Magazine’s Web site.
If Anderson’s theory is correct, and all media are in the throes of radical change, libraries may be well-positioned for this new era. The Long Tail is something they understand and have practiced for years, perhaps without realizing it, says Nancy Davenport, President, Council for Library and Information Resources. The model for how libraries have built their collections sounds a lot like The Long Tail. Whether it’s New York Times best-sellers or scholarly journals, libraries stock up
on what they need to meet “high point” demand, she says, but also purchase less popular materials to
fill out the collection and serve niches, which might be genealogy, travel or the history of furniture
making. “Libraries are the edification of The Long Tail,” she says.
Marylaine Block, a librarian who now is a speaker and consultant, agrees, saying that libraries are the
original Long Tail. “Libraries have been in The Long Tail business for centuries. The only thing new
about The Long Tail is that because of the Internet, the commercial world is just now discovering it. If
you think about it, libraries and museums have always been the basic preservation mechanisms of all
items, including those of limited popularity. And libraries have been offering public access to them
not only for their own clienteles, but to the rest of the world.”
Block says that before the World Wide Web and search engines, the printed National Union Catalog gave access to the holdings of thousands of libraries. Then several library cooperatives took the digital cataloging records provided by the Library of Congress and made holdings of even more libraries from around the world available online. These resources became the backbone for a system that greatly sped the identification and transfer of relevant books, journal articles and documents among researchers and information seekers.
“The Internet has added to that capability with search engines for the holdings of rare and used book dealers, and even with eBay, but it has in no way replaced it,” she says.
Says Robert H. McDonald, Associate Director of Libraries for Technology and Research, Florida State University, “Libraries extend The Long Tail by utilizing the Internet to link to electronic resources, interlibrary loan and other digital library materials.”
So if libraries have lived The Long Tail for many years, is there no impact on them from this new economic model? Not quite! Libraries need to move from stage one of The Long Tail—digital catalogs of physical items—to stage two—digital catalogs of digital goods. Libraries need to embrace the new digitization and networking capabilities inherent in The Long Tail, which create some intriguing possibilities. Among them:
Make Everything Available
The Long Tail says Make Everything Available. It’s now economical to store everything, popular,
less popular and obscure. They’re only bytes on a hard drive without the cost of shelf space or packaging or distribution. This suggests that collections need to provide a broad, seamless range of information that includes not only local holdings but those of other libraries and commercial
publishers. It also suggests that libraries digitize their collections to make them available electronically as well as physically.
“I am curious about the effect that The Long Tail will have on our book collections,” says McDonald. “Most users prefer online resources because they can be accessed anywhere. But the maintenance and upkeep of the legacy book stacks in many ways prevents the further extension of what libraries are trying to do with electronic resources.”
McDonald thinks The Long Tail provides compelling evidence that research libraries should consider
digitizing their entire collections in order to store legacy print collections off-site. He says that currently, libraries have a lot of items that don’t circulate. About 80 percent of a library’s circulation is from 20 percent of its collection. Offering more online content would not only respond to user preferences but also could drive the use of print materials.
Help Me Find It
The Long Tail says Help Me Find It. Provide familiar entry points, make sure there is enough choice, and let users follow the contours of their likes and dislikes. Long Tail businesses like Amazon and NetFlix use recommendations to do this, guiding and directing users along their discovery path, from the Head into the Tail. McDonald thinks that The Long Tail and its user recommendations will change computerized searching at libraries.
“I definitely see the search and discovery mechanism devolving from the OPAC that is built into
current LMS systems because these do not handle digital rights mechanisms well nor do they search
across other information services well,” he says. “As new metasearch tools evolve so will our ability to provide access to the wealth of online full-text items extending from the current lease source back to Long Tail items that are permanently available from our online systems.”
Block thinks that libraries should use recommendations the way that Amazon does, off to the side, with lists on similar kinds of titles.
Cut The Price In Half, Then Lower It
The Long Tail says Cut The Price In Half, Then Lower It. Price according to digital costs, not physical ones. When you lower the price, people tend to buy more—possibly a lot more, according to The Long Tail model. While libraries are free to users, the point that low prices and digital delivery create increasing demand is important to libraries, which essentially pay the bill for their users.
“As we offer more online content we will get demand for more online content because libraries cover expansive areas of literature for many disciplines, not just what’s licensable in digital audio format,” says McDonald. “One successful transaction leads to more citations of which we will need more online content.”
To Davenport, lower prices are an area where The Long Tail model breaks down for libraries largely
because they are content renters rather than content owners in the digital world. Publishers benefit from lower storage and distribution costs, but libraries pay subscription fees, which usually increase every year.
“There’s an economic flip to the equation for libraries. The Tail gets expensive. Libraries are concerned about the spiraling costs of the paperless society, which so far has only created more scholarship faster to bring into the collection.” The Long Tail suggests that prices for e-articles, e-journals and ebooks should be much lower, she says.
Whether The Long Tail becomes the definitive digital business model, libraries know they are operating in a different world today, says Davenport. The digital world presents a whole new set of challenges, and libraries need to reposition themselves. Among the questions: will digitization revitalize the use of physical materials? What does collection development mean in the digital environment? How will the concept of discovery change?
Davenport says libraries are dealing with a generation used to having everything at their fingertips, à la
The Long Tail. “Immediacy is standard operating policy. This is our new performance measure.”
Long live The Long Tail.
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