The Long Tail

Wired cover story on FREE now live

And so it begins. Just as I started The Long Tail with a feature in my own magazine in 2004, today FREE begins in magazine form: a 6,000 word preview of the book in the current issue of Wired.

The big differences this time. First, we finally figured out how to package my abstract thinking into something that would work as a cover (The Long Tail wasn't on the cover back in '04 because in cover testing nobody seemed to "get it"!). And second, we've got our website back this time, so we've put a lot more work in the presenting it better online, including a video, a way to get the print magazine free this month and a wiki on free business models.

The feedback I get on this piece and on the exploration of other FREE themes on this blog over the next year will be invaluable in making a better book, just as it was with The Long Tail. This is the start of my explorations of the world of FREE, not the end.

Oprah + FREE = Blockbuster

Reader Duncan Rawlinson writes in with a cool example of free books (AP story excerpted here):

"Free business book is Web sensation

The Oprah touch doesn't just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman's "Women & Money" were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey's television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, for a period of 33 hours....

"The download offer "has built excitement for Suze's book across all formats," Julie Grau, the book's publisher, said in a statement.

According to Saturday's statement from Winfrey, more than 1.1 million copies of Orman's financial advice book were downloaded in English, and another 19,000 in Spanish. The demand compares to such free online sensations as "The 9-11 Commission Report," which the federal government made available for downloads, and Stephen King's e-novella, "Riding the Bullet."

The publishing community has endlessly debated the effects of making text available online, with some saying that free downloading is a valuable promotional tool and others worrying that sales for paper editions would be harmed. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers each have sued Google for its plans to scan and index books for the Internet.

The offer for "Women & Money," originally released a year ago by Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, Inc., has not kept people from buying the traditional version. As of Saturday, the book ranked No. 6 on Amazon.com [Note: As of Sunday, it was No 2]. The paper edition of "The 9-11 Commission Report," published in 2004 by W.W. Norton and Co., was a best seller for months.

"I can tell you that with respect to the `9-11 Report,' the free download did not seem to hurt sales at all," Norton publisher Drake McFeely told The Associated Press on Saturday. 'There were people who wanted it quickly, in a less convenient form, and that was clearly a different market from the people who wanted the traditional book.'..."

For fun, I plotted the sales of the book on Amazon for the past month, which includes more than three weeks before it was available for free and a bit less than one week since it was given away for a day and half on Oprah's website. Here's the data, thanks to TitleZ:

Certainly looks like free books didn't hurt her sales ;-)

Latest free news

This is a good sign: it's getting really hard to keep on top of the flood of "free" news. I'm on the road (in Atlanta, talking to radio folks), but here, in telegraphic form, are the latest ones of note from the past few days:

[First, a news flash! My book will be previewed as the cover story in Wired this month. Out in about ten days. Link then. I think you'll like it ;-)]

• Kevin Kelly has been on tear of great writing/thinking about free, including this delightful rhapsody on eight new scarcities created by free (remember: every abundance creates a new scarcity), and this, on how technology "wants to be free".
• Another great thinker/writer about free is Techdirt's Mike Masnick. If you haven't subscribed to his feed, you should. Start here.
• Tim O'Reilly's TOC conference, now underway, has spurred the book industry to announce some modest experiments in free, such as limited versions of free online books and selling books by the chapter. Harper Collins is taking the lead, including free books by Paulo Coelho and Neil Gaiman. The idea is that these are "samplers" that will drive sales of older books. This is all good, but it's just a start...
• Q: Does Microsoft's bid for Yahoo stem from the company's fear that Office is competing with free? (A: No. But I appreciate the suggestion that free productivity software in now a mainstream idea anyway...)
• Whoops! Glenn Fleishman reminds me that the biggest free news of the day is actually Starbucks switching to free WiFi for people who use the Starbucks cards. [My excuse for the miss: I'm an Verizon Evdo junkie, even though it's anything but free, and I don't use WiFi in public spaces anymore]

Narrower is better (dark thoughts during NPR pledge week)

Around these parts it's NPR pledge week, which used to mean that I'd spend even more time in the car on the cellphone to avoid having to listen to my local affiliate's endless fundraising guilt trip. But now that I've switched to an iPhone, I've noticed a different behavior. I'm listening to more and more of my favorite NPR shows (This American Life, Terry Gross's Fresh Air, Science Friday, etc) as podcasts, something that finally suits me thanks to having a phone that automatically loads the latest shows. I don't have to avoid the NPR pledge drive anymore.

At the beginning of each podcast Terry Gross tips her hat to the local broadcast affilates, which is nice but otherwise pretty pointless. But every now and then Ira Glass (pictured), the host of This American Life, reminds us that the bandwidth bill for these free podcasts is more than $100,000 a year, and encourages us to go to the show's website to donate something to offset that. And I just did that, donating $50 in a week when I'm ignoring my local NPR affiliate's plea to do the same.

Why? Well, in thinking about it, I realized that I don't really support my local affiliate. I love some of the shows it broadcasts and hate others (have you heard the California Report? Dreadful). My attachments are to individual shows, not to a broadcast station. My engagement with public radio is at a more granular level than the affiliate. I just don't care that much about KQED, and now that I've got another way to get the shows I like, I don't really feel much of a connection to it.

Now that I get my radio via podcast, I don't have to take the bad shows with the good. I've got an a la carte menu, and I assemble my own schedule with what I want and when I want it. My feelings about radio stations are mixed, but my feelings about individual shows are crystal clear.

What if everyone did what I do? Well, both radio-via-airwaves and radio-via-podcast are free, and both can appeal directly to contributors to help pay their bills. Of course most of This American's Life's costs are covered by affiliate syndication fees, and if the affiliates couldn't pay those, it would take more than an online tip jar to pay the costs of making the show. And obviously those who don't have access to podcasts would be hurt if public radio broadcasters shut down.

But look at the arc of history here. The podcast model is getting cheaper and more ubiquitously available (who doesn't have a cellphone?), and it serves individual needs and taste better. Meanwhile the broadcast model, which is all about one-size-fits-all taste, is based on human labor costs and costly transmission equipment and is only getting more expensive. You can see how this story ends.

My shifting of funding from the general (radio station) to the specific (show) tells me that radio is going to get microchunked, just like the rest of media. The more granular, the better. We're about to find out where people's loyalties really lie.