The Long Tail (9 page)

The traditional process of creating an encyclopedia—professional editors, academic writers, and peer review—aims for perfection. It seldom gets there, but the pursuit of accuracy and clarity results in a work that is consistent and reliable, but also incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce. Likewise for most other products of the professional publishing industry: One can expect that a book will, in fact, have printing on both sides of the pages where intended and will be more or less spelled correctly. There is a quality threshold, below which the work does not fall.

With probabilistic systems, though, there is only a statistical level of quality, which is to say: Some things will be great, some things will be mediocre, and some things will be absolutely crappy. That’s just the nature of the beast. The mistake of many of the critics is to expect otherwise. Wikipedia is simply a different animal from
Britannica
. It’s a living community rather than a static reference work.

The true miracle of Wikipedia is that this open system of amateur user contributions and edits doesn’t simply collapse into anarchy. Instead, it has somehow self-organized the most comprehensive encyclopedia in history. Reversing entropy’s arrow, Jimmy Wales’s catalytic moment—putting up a few initial entries and a mechanism for others to add to them—has actually created order from chaos.

The result is a very different kind of encyclopedia, one completely unbounded by space and production constraints. It offers all the expected entries of any world-class reference work and then hundreds of thousands of unexpected ones, ranging from articles that go into textbook-like depth in fields such as quantum mechanics to biograph
ical entries on comic book characters. Or, to put it another way, it’s got all the hits plus a huge number of niches.

The classic model of the encyclopedia is a curated list of received cultural literacy. There is the basic canon, which must be recognized by authorities. Then, there are other entries of diminishing length until you get to that line at which the priests of
Britannica
decide “This is not worthy.” There, the classic encyclopedia ends. Wikipedia, on the other hand, just
keeps going
.

In a sense, you can think of Wikipedia as equivalent to Rhapsody, the music site. There are the popular top 1,000, which can be found in any encyclopedia: Julius Caesar, World War II, Statistics, etc. These are like the hit songs. With these, Wikipedia is competing with professionals at their best, who produce well-written, authoritative entries that deploy facts with the easy comfort that comes with great scholarship. The main advantage of the user-created Wikipedia model for these entries is its ability to be up-to-date, have unlimited length and visual aids (such as photos and charts), include copious links to support material elsewhere, and perhaps, better represent alternate views and controversies.

In the middle of the curve, from the 1,000th entry to where
Britannica
ends at 120,000, are the narrower subjects: Caesarian Section, Okinawa, Regression Analysis, etc. Here, the Wikipedia model begins to pull ahead of its professional competition. Unlimited space means that the Wikipedia entries tend to be longer and more comprehensive. While the average length of a
Britannica
entry was 678 words in 2006, more than 200,000 Wikipedia entries (more than two entire
Britannicas
) were longer than that. Meanwhile, the external links and updated information emerge as a key advantage as Wikipedia becomes a launching place for further research.

Then there is the Tail, from 120,000 to 1 million. These are the entries that Wikipedia has that no other encyclopedia even attempts to include. Its articles on these subjects—Caesar Cipher, Canned Spam, Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient—range from among the best in Wikipedia (those written by passionate experts) to the worst (self-promotion, score-settling, and pranks). While many critics focus on the worst entries, the really important thing about Wikipedia’s Tail is that
there is nothing else like it
anywhere
. From hard-core science to up-to-the-minute politics, Wikipedia goes where no other encyclopedia—whether constrained by paper or DVD limitations—can.
Britannica
doesn’t have an entry about the Long Tail phenomenon (yet), but Wikipedia’s entry is not only well written and thorough, it’s also 1,500 words long (and none of it was written by me!).

Wikipedia authors tend to be enthusiastically involved, liberated, and motivated by the opportunity to improve public understanding of some subject they know and love, a population that has, in five short years, grown a thousandfold with an invasion of empowered amateurs using the simple, newly democratized tools of encyclopedia production: a Web browser and an Internet connection.

This is the world of “peer production,” the extraordinary Internet-enabled phenomenon of mass volunteerism and amateurism. We are at the dawn of an age where most producers in any domain are unpaid, and the main difference between them and their professional counterparts is simply the (shrinking) gap in the resources available to them to extend the ambition of their work. When the tools of production are available to everyone, everyone becomes a producer.

THE REPUTATION ECONOMY

Why do they do it? Why does anyone create something of value (from an encyclopedia entry to an astronomical observation) without a business plan or even the prospect of a paycheck? The question is a key one to understanding the Long Tail, partly because so much of what populates the curve does not start with commercial aim. More important, this question matters because it represents yet another example of where our presumptions about markets must be rethought. The motives to create are not the same in the head as they are in the tail. One economic model doesn’t fit all. You can think of the Long Tail starting as a traditional monetary economy at the head and ending in a non-monetary economy in the tail. In between the two, it’s a mixture of both.

Up at the head, where products benefit from the powerful, but ex
pensive, channels of mass-market distribution, business considerations rule. It’s the domain of professionals, and as much as they might love what they do, it’s a job, too. The costs of production and distribution are too high to let economics take a backseat to creativity. Money drives the process.

Down in the tail, where distribution and production costs are low (thanks to the democratizing power of digital technologies), business considerations are often secondary. Instead, people create for a variety of other reasons—expression, fun, experimentation, and so on. The reason one might call it an economy at all is that there is a coin of the realm that can be every bit as motivating as money:
reputation
. Measured by the amount of attention a product attracts, reputation can be converted into other things of value: jobs, tenure, audiences, and lucrative offers of all sorts.

Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, calls this the “exposure culture.” Using blogs as an example, he writes,

The exposure culture reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything. Web authors link to each other, quote liberally, and sometimes annotate entire articles. E-mailing links to favorite articles and jokes has become as much a part of American work culture as the water cooler. The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship. And at the center of this exposure culture is the almighty search engine. If your site is easy to find on Google, you don’t sue—you celebrate.

Once you think of the curve as being populated with creators who have different incentives, it’s easy to extend that to their intellectual property interests as well. Disney and Metallica may be doing all they can to embrace and extend copyright, but there are plenty of other (maybe even more) artists and producers who see free peer-to-peer (“P2P”) distribution as low-cost marketing. Musicians can turn that into an audience for their live shows, indie filmmakers treat it as a viral resume, and academics treat free downloads of their papers as a way to increase their impact and audience.

Each of these perspectives changes how the creators feel about copyright. At the top of the curve, the studios, major labels, and publishers defend their copyright fiercely. In the middle, the domain of independent labels and academic presses, it’s a gray area. Farther down the tail, more firmly in the noncommercial zone, an increasing number of content creators are choosing explicitly to give up some of their copyright protections. Since 2002, a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons has been issuing licenses of the same name to allow for a flexible use of certain copyrighted works for the sake of the greater value (for the content creators) of free distribution, remixing, and other peer-to-peer propagation of their ideas, interests, and fame. (Indeed, I’ve done that with my own blog, for all of the reasons above.)

In short, some creators care about copyright and some don’t. Yet the law doesn’t distinguish between them—copyright is automatically granted and protected unless explicitly waived. As a result, the power of “free” is obscured by fears over piracy and is often viewed with suspicion, not least because it evokes unfortunate echoes of both communism and hippie sloganeering.

Regardless, it’s something we’re starting to reconsider as the power of the “gift economy” becomes clear—in everything from the blogosphere to open source. In one part of my professional life (the 650,000-circulation magazine I edit), I’m near the head of the curve, and in another (my 30,000-reader blog) I’m in the tail. My decisions on intellectual property are different in each. Someday soon, I hope, marketplace and regulation will more accurately reflect this reality.

SELF-PUBLISHING WITHOUT SHAME

We think of books through a commercial lens, assuming that most authors want to write a best-seller and get rich. But the reality is that the vast majority of authors not only won’t become best-sellers, but also aren’t even trying to write a hugely popular book. Each year, nearly 200,000 books are published in English. Fewer than 20,000 will make it into the average book superstore. Most won’t sell.

In 2004, 950,000 books out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen BookScan sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. In other words, about 98 percent of books are noncommercial, whether they were intended that way or not.

The quest for mass-market acceptance requires compromise—a willingness to pick topics of broad rather than narrow interest, and to write in conversational rather than academic style. Most writers can’t do that and many others won’t. Instead, the vast majority of authors choose to follow their passions and assume they won’t make money. Many want no more than to be read by some group that matters to them—from their peers to like-minded souls.

Such profitless publishing can be lucrative all the same. The book becomes not the product of value but the
advertisement
for the product of value—the authors themselves. Many such noncommercial books are best seen as marketing vehicles meant to enhance the academic reputation of their authors, market their consultancy, earn them speaking fees, or just leave their mark on the world. Seen that way, self-publishing is not a way to make money; it’s a way to distribute your message.

To get a glimpse of that world, consider Lulu.com, which is a new breed of DIY publisher. For less than two hundred dollars, Lulu can not only turn your book into a paperback or hardcover and give it an ISBN number, but also ensure that it gets listed with online retailers. Once it’s listed, the book will be available to an audience of millions and potentially side by side with
Harry Potter
, if the winds of the recommendation engines blow that way. With Lulu, the copies are printed in batches as small as a few dozen and the inventory is replenished as needed via print-on-demand. It’s an extraordinary improvement over the scorned “vanity” publishing model of just a few years ago. As a result, thousands of authors are now choosing this route.

Here were the top five self-published books on Lulu when I looked in 2006:

1. Raw Foods for Busy People: Simple and Machine-Free Recipes for Every Day
   
2. The Havanese
   (“The quintessential handbook for Havanese dog owners, breeders and fanciers.”)
   
3. Investigating Biology—A Laboratory Manual for BIO 100,
   12th Edition
   
4. Maximum SAT
   
5. How to Start a Wedding Planning Business
   

All of them have sold between 5,000 and 50,000 copies, which is not bad. Eighty percent of the profits from these sales go directly to the authors, compared to 15 percent for standard publishers. So much for the notion that self-publishing is just for losers.

Still, most authors don’t use such self-publishing services to make money, nor do they expect to hit it big. The vast majority of Lulu’s other few thousand customers choose to self-publish because they know that what they’re writing isn’t likely to sell enough to make the search for a commercial publisher worthwhile. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a potential audience; it’s just that it’s a small one.

A few years ago, most of these authors wouldn’t have been published at all—and that would have been enough to discourage many of them from writing a book in the first place. But today, the economics of publishing have fallen so low that nearly everyone can do it. That means people can write books for whatever reason they want, and they don’t need to depend on some publisher deciding if the book is worth taking to market.