CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
February 2007, Vol. 49, No. 2
Garrett Bringle worked hard on his Nebraska farm to feed his family and to earn enough money to buy necessities that he could neither grow nor make. When he needed to purchase something, there was only one place to go, Greengate's General Store. Prices were high; choice was non-existent. Garrett and his neighbors paid up and muttered all the way back to their farms.One Sunday, in 1897, Garrett noticed Joe Springfield stifle a yawn and check the time on a pocket watch during Reverend Knapp's sermon. With twice as many mouths to feed as Garrett, how could Joe afford a watch? Garrett cornered Joe after Sunday meeting. Joe pulled a fat book from under the seat of his wagon and handed it to Garrett. "Friend," he said, "They call it the Wish Book. It's 800 pages of everything you can think of, with prices much lower than Greengate's. Keep it. I'm expecting another in the mail." Garrett thumbed through thousands of pictures of things Greengate could never stock in his store. Garrett could hardly wait to show Emily and the children! Thanks to Richard Sears and Alvah C. Roebuck, rural families throughout the country experienced an early version of the "long tail." Still, because of advances in transportation and the shift to urban living, it would be another century before the long tail began changing the way Americans did business.
Chris Anderson explains that the "long tail" is best understood in contrast to "hits" and "misses." If you graph sales of music on CD, for example, a handful of recordings will comprise most of those sold. This is the "head" of the demand graph, a small number of hits bringing in most of the revenue. As you move away from the "head" of the graph, you find all of the other available recordings. Anderson notes that, although each "miss" sells only a few copies, almost none sell absolutely no copies. The tail of the curve never quite reaches zero. While each "miss" sells many fewer copies than any single "hit," there are vastly more "misses" than "hits." Figure out how to sell "misses" and you will make a huge number of sales. Anderson prefers the term "niches" over "misses" because the items in the long tail fill niches of demand. The challenge is finding customers who demand niche products.
How did we end up in a "hit or miss" economy? "Atoms," answers Anderson. There is only so much shelf space in any sales location. Greengate's general store had little shelf space. Today, products still compete for space in brick & mortar stores. Products that sell in large numbers get space. Those that do not, disappear. Manufacturers and retailers are guided by the 80/20 Rule: identify the 20 percent of the products that will earn 80 percent of the profit. Until recently, this has meant predicting hits.
Anderson asserts that the long tail spells the demise of the 80/20 Rule and "hit and miss" economics. No longer must products be near the customer. Products can be stored anywhere, even at several locations. Instead of physical proximity, the customer requires detailed, easy-to-access information about the product. Freed from competition for shelf space, producers and retailers need not predict hits. They can offer a wider range of products and let customers choose. They can afford to satisfy customers with niche products because those products will not take up expensive retail space. Readers will appreciate Anderson's illustrations of how Amazon.com, E-Bay, Netflix, and others have exploited the long tail. The ultimate long tail product requires no atoms, no shelf space-iTunes, for example.
Librarians may recognize both the 80/20 Rule and the long tail in our approaches to satisfying patron demand. We pre-order titles that reflect community taste, but we developed interlibrary loan to fill the unusual request. Our union catalogs find scattered locations for desired titles. Years ago, Charles Robinson sparked a stimulating debate within our profession by advocating a strictly demand-driven, 80/20 approach to book selection. Later, we saw our first online catalogs as an exciting way to inform patrons about all of our holdings, not just those on the new bookrack. Consortia created OPAC's with the holdings of many libraries, helping readers find titles on the shelves of partner libraries. ReQuest encourages readers to view holdings of participating institutions as a single collection whose titles are available to them. Many libraries offer "atom-less" services, like downloadable audio books, where the library provides nothing except information on titles and authorization to access an electronic source. Libraries will continue exploiting ever-improving technologies to reach patrons whose reading and information preferences stretch from the head of the demand graph to the tip of its long tail. Garrett Bringle's great granddaughter may be reading a blog right now to decide which title she wants to borrow on her next visit to the local library.
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