The Google print project to digitize the world’s books has been controversial.  I think this is one of those things that will impact us in ways most of us fail to grasp today.  

Take, for example, public domain out of copyright books – of which there are apparently more than 2 million.  It stands to reason that there is a long tail demand for those books that in total could be significant – but for any given book the demand is too small to print and distribute in the traditional manner.

One could of course read virtual copies courtesy of Google – but it may take a long time before we are collectively comfortable with that, rather than holding the book in our hands.

Enter the Espresso Book Machine.   Choose your book, and the machine prints, binds and spits it out in a few short minutes – for under $10.00

The just released Industry Canada commissioned study on P2P downloading has been getting a lot of attention in the press and blogosphere. Essentially the study found that P2P music downloading has not caused a decrease in music sales. Indeed, it showed that those who download a lot tend to buy more.

More food for thought on the debate over giving away things to make money can be found in a post by Chris Anderson entitled Free is more complicated than you think.

He refers to a column by Scott Adams (Dilbert) and concludes that making a book available for free can help with visibility and sales for authors and topics that are not well known, but may not work that way for well known authors. So, as in many things in life, the answer to the dilemma is “it depends”.

Read Michael Geist’s comment on the Industry Canada study

Read Michael’s follow up post

Read Chris Anderson’s article

Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs had a post yesterday about some discussion that started at BusinessWeek about whether the blogosphere is losing credibility because of the amount of boring and stupid things it contains.

As Kevin points out, if bloggers say something offbase, others are eager to comment.

As I pointed out in a comment I left on his site, blogs started out without credibility, but have gained it over time as people adopted them for strategic value.

It also puts it in perspective if one understands the long tail theory. (See my post from yesterday about Chris Anderson’s book of that name.) Yes, there is a lot of stuff out that there without appeal, but “post-filters” such as search engines, user recommendations, reviews, and other blogs help each of us find and separate what is useful to each of us.

Read Kevin’s post

I just read this book, which will be available in a few days. (Thanks to the book’s publicist for sending me an advance reading copy.) Chris Anderson is the Wired editor who wrote the oft quoted column about the long tail (the phrase relates to the shape of the graph) in an October 2004 Wired article.

The basic concept is that there is a viable business model for selling fewer numbers of more things. For example, the hundreds of thousands of songs that Wal Mart doesn’t stock.

The book traces the concept back to Sears Roebuck mail order in the late 1800′s. The enabler of the current long tail boom is, of course, the Internet. Chris includes examples of the long tail at work, including companies such as e-bay and Kitchenaid. That’s right, Kitchenaid.

The book explains the workings of long tail economics, why it works, and how we need to change the way we think about products and how they are sold.

The book is a good, thought provoking read. I recommend it to anyone selling anything, and anyone interested in the fundamental paradigm shift this concept describes.

Ironically, this book will not be a long tail product itself, but will be sold in part by long tail methods. That statement will make sense if you read the book.

Read the original Wired article

Go to the book’s blog

Read an article I wrote that talks about the concept