Gavin Bell Toc09 Long Tail Needs Community Sm

The Long Tail needs
Community
Gavin Bell
Tools of Change 2009

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Hi
I’m going to talk about how supporting community and social interaction will be
beneﬁcial if not essential to publishers in the next few years.

I will be sharing my slides after the talk, so enjoy the pretty pictures.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/artcriminal/1249601513/sizes/l/


http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/paopix/194178681/sizes/l/

How do we get beyond simple purchasing data to see behaviour around books

How much social activity there is currently around reading

How to make applications that extend the scope for activity around your books

I think it is possible to build services that extend the relationship that you have with the
people who buy your books.

This talk is focused on non-ﬁction and not the blockbuster books, but the thousands of other
books.

• Beyond purchasing







books.

• Social activity







books.

• Social activity
• Creating applications







books.

The Long Tail 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Long_tail.svg
You must all know about the long tail
Those endless shelves of plenty
A product for everyone, no matter their taste

There is some question over its validity, does the internet just create blockbusters

Is it just Fat Head? 4

Is it all fat head,
the mainstream 20% of the market that makes the sales.
You know the truth to this, as you make the books

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/xrm0/2479540688/sizes/o/

I’m not going to debate the merits of economic theory, but I think that
The long tail will still accounts for a substantial chunk of your business

Support for this comes from Google book search and back list sales

Musical stories 5

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2283392272/sizes/l/

Music is where a lot of this started, certainly a lot of the advanced behaviours come from the
music area, so what can we learn from this space.

Who wouldn’t want to own a iTunes like store?

iTunes 6

iTunes does a lot more than allow for sale of music.

Tracking listening habits
Managing playlists,
helped drive random access to music
Genius recommendations

Music almost always gets consumed.
How many of you have an un-listened to album?
And an unread book, more than 10, 50?

Last.fm 7

Tracking listening behaviour
Show lastgraph, this shows my listening activity for October last year.
Social tools too, radio based on your friends tastes.

Music is easy to aggregate, as it is largely digital, we are frequently online when we are
listening to it or our devices can remember what we listened to for us.

Aggregation of behaviour 8

Show ﬁreeagle / dopplr- where I have been
What I have taken pictures of from ﬂickr
What I have listened to via last.fm
What I have said on twitter

Digital is easier 9

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3199655294/sizes/l/

This is the travel site dopplr, the annual report represents the travels for a person, in this
case a mock using real data for President Obama.

Digital can be remembered, annotated, tracked, located and stored
Then processed, visualised and used in clever ways

However the tools from one area do not apply easily to another.
A last.fm or iTunes or Flickr for books will be a dismal failure

Dusty tomes? 10
http://flickr.com/photos/beesparkle/111324645/

So what does this mean for books?
Are they a lost cause?

To twist the knife a bit more, people listen to albums many times
Several of the tracks on this computer I’ve listened to 50-60 times.

None of you can boast those re-reading rates for books

Making reading work harder 11

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/midiman/284804050/sizes/l/

Reading a book takes time, we need to reward readers for reading.
Reading the book changes them

But we also need to get their opinions, suggestions and recommendations from them
How can we connect a happy reader with another book we sell?
An eternal question.

Can we help our readers by sca!olding the experience and making it social
Every book has a unique audience of people who have read it, these people have something
in common and may wish to discuss or use the materials in the book with one another. Book
groups are one example of this.

Ebooks? 12

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tnkgrl/2555922960/sizes/l/
Ebooks, whether downloadable PDF or Kindle
O!er a brave new world of potential reading surveillance (kindly meant)

Will you be able to get the reading data behind this activity.
We can start to understand if the interface to the content we have created is appropriate and
e!ective.
The New York Times constantly refine and test the layout and navigation on their site, we do
this once with our books, yet both are textual information.

Or will this be the same as PDF and iTunes and will you be disintermediated?
This post sale behavioural data is really useful, we have the potential to get it finally, but only
if you as publishers demand access to it from the vendors

O’Reilly’s Safari and other online content services do give you this high level of trackability,
but this is not the dominant form, yet

Connected open platforms 13

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/bispham2/1415787067/sizes/o/
There is a huge potential here I think for an open platform for reading books, connected to
the normal internet.

Some interesting developments are the Stanza reader on the iPhone

I’d certainly want to know about reading behaviour on this device
(how much, how far, repeat, what else in catalog, there are dozens of datapoints)

[Yes it is all about the catalog]

14

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/53264755@N00/2782983222/sizes/o/

Having excited you with talk of ebooks and whatnot.
Lets return to the world of $10 and $20 paperbacks and not $360 toys.

Given that clever data capture tools which exist in the digital world will be slow(er) to come to
the world of printed books, what can we do to support community endeavours.

We’ll need to work harder as the data won’t come for free, like it does with music.

Out of print books 15

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ices-Deﬁnitive-Guide-Caroline-Liddell/dp/1898697264/

This book is out of print
There are many like it
How would you know that this book is in demand
Google Book Search will help

How did something that is in demand go out of print?
People are willing to pay more than the original price for this book secondhand
Print on demand looks like it will help here, that is true,

How can you make use of the fact that this is a popular book, despite its age and scarcity.
How can you harness the interest from the community generated by the publication of this
book.

Social Reading 16

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/cobra/5465955/sizes/o/
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/cobra/5465940/sizes/o/

By publishing books you are already creating communities, the purchasers of your books.
If your relationship ends at the till, you are missing out.

Cars get servicing, Computers get software updates
Books do get errata, but most people never see them

I think it is possible to develop a longer term relationship with the purchasers and readers of
your books.

These annotations show the desire to explore and understand content, the prose is Joyce’s
Ulysses in case you are curious

Authorship 17

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fil/247295019/sizes/l/
Writing a book takes time
[I know I’m nearly finished mine]

The process of authorship is social, the myth of the writer in their garret on their own is just
that. We discuss and get feedback on our books as we write. Some of us will keep it private.

Generally this is a private process amongst friends, but it is moving online

Social Authorship 18

Nice feedback on books before print, community involvement can be really positive with the
odd brickbat.

Can lead to increased sales, certainly helps with the reputation of the book.

I think this model would work brilliantly with travel and cookery.

Readers 19

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/pensiero/1473000980/sizes/o/
What can readers themselves bring.

Recommendations on the basis of actually having read the content, as opposed to simply
purchasing it.

We need to build tools to support their interactions

They are capable of creating content, they want to share information, they have the tools to
do this now, just like you and I do.
Why shouldn’t the relationship become two way

More than just talk 20

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/aldoaldoz/2833634876/sizes/l/
We’ve all see enough simple message boards.

A message board is no longer enough, a little pen for people to be herded inside to talk

You are not doing community / social media with one of these
Neither is having a facebook app, a twitter account or an iPhone app*
*Insert latest fad

I’m going to walk you through how you ﬁgure out what you can build

We will look at how we can extend the interaction beyond a simple review.

Content 21

Traditionally this is your domain, gradually it is moving away from the conﬁnes of a perfect
bound book into book shaped objects as Erin McKean would describe them

Photo of the “On the road” manuscript by Jack Kerouac

Putting your content online so that others can link to it and build upon it is an important next
step in terms of how we can sca!old the relationship between the people who have read the
book.

They need some common frame of reference in order to be able to ﬁnd one another and start
to form relationships. A page in a publishers catalog is not enough, we can do better than
that.


Kodak allowing good and bad reviews of their products right on their own site
Default is to show the good reviews, but dig deeper and the bad ones are there too
With responses from Kodak addressing the complaints, not deleted or censored.

Activity 23

What kinds of thing are we going to host, the interactions with a book can be much richer
than a three line review. We need to figure out the activities that our readers perform.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nebneb/101601957/sizes/l/
Unless you been inside one or heard of a pillowfight, this might seem like an odd picture, the
same is true of much social software.

What is Flickr about - At first glance it is photography
Look deeper and it is pure social interaction, conversation and friendship.

Twitter is hard to get as it is seemingly a conversation between millions of people at once, a
real tower of babel. Again at a distance it is noise, but on the inside it is people’s real lives
and activity.

Understanding the kind of activity that is appropriate for each section of your published
catalog is vital. There is not a single appropriate social model for all book interactions.
Programming books, travel, cookery and romances will have di!erent needs.

Objects 24

These are the objects we are familiar with, the ones we sell.
But what do our readers use these objects to create.

The activities that our books help them to achieve result in a enormous variety of other
objects being created

These will be the basis for rich and deep social applications
Where are the woodworking / cookery / wine tasting applications connecting the objects in
people’s lives with the content we generate and the conversation around both

What is most interesting is the stu! that stems from the reaction to the content in the book,
not necessarily the reaction to the book. Capturing this second order activity gives you the
basis for long term engagement

Verbs 25
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/76301418@N00/109909940/

What makes these applications rich and deep is their ﬁt.

We are in the early days of these kinds of applications.
We have seen ones which cling closely to the major media types.
Flickr for photography etc

If we can frame the kinds of activity that will spring from our books

and build tools to help manage the objects that the books will manifest

then the last part is understanding what kinds of interactions we need to support online.
I describe these as the verbs of the application.

Largely they are the interactions that happen between fellow readers on the site. The primary
relationship should be reader to reader, publishers do not need to be the focus of the
attention, not do we need to mediate it, manage it yes, but I’ll come to that.

Analyse the things that will come from people using the content in your book and you will
see the actions they will be able to perform online together.

Social objects 26

If we can support this way of thinking then we will be supporting our readers in their lives,
acting out based on what our books have helped them to achieve, in return they will share
with us their own objects. -- These are often called social objects.

The photos earlier from my ﬂickr stream where not just pictures.
They where my photos of things that have meaning in my life.
They have connection with my friends.
Each of them has a content speciﬁc set of actions that I and my friends can carry out on the
objects. It is important to understand this and determine the appropriate actions for your
domain.

we need to think in terms of the social life of each object, prior and post action. There can
also be multiple actions eg recommendation, purchase, listen, lend

Jyri Engeström - social objects
Dan Hill - social life of a broadcast

Activity centred design and
Activity theory

27

The science bit !!

There is a great body of research looking at understanding these contextual social
relationships.
Two examples - the Don Norman activity centred design, a good improvement on a pure user
centred design approach. This takes an internal information processing view of the world and
looks at individual goal driven actions. Don’s suggestion in 2005 broadened the scope to
include a wider activity based analysis
See hcd considered harmful http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered.html

Activity theory - A psychological model of how we act, respecting our social interaction with
others and capacity for development. Derived from a new model of consciousness, one that
accommodates the social nature of ourselves.

Personally I’m really excited about this area, it will lead to great advances in how we develop
the social web. The social object ideas spring from here and its science background makes it
robust.
See Acting with Technology series from MIT press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11004

People 28

The people who have read your book are not all the same, they will have read many di!erent
books, perhaps many from you or just one or two
Make sure though that you don’t have them create an account per business division so that
you push the work of identity management onto them.
Recognise them as the same individual across all of your properties, from login to cookies
they are the same person, even across di!erent devices.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jamescridland/613445810/sizes/l/
The role of the community manager will become as vital as that of editor.
This change is happening in news media already.

Valuing the reader becomes an important aspect.
A simple language change can help
I always refer to the people coming to nature.com as our readers, never users.
They have a role on our site, user neuters any context rending them like numbers.

Give them a proﬁle page, let them discover and interact with one another.

Community management 29

People don’t come here because the table clothes are yellow.

They come for a range of things, but the decor isn’t the one.
Running a community website is much like running a bar.
There are people who own the place, people who run it and the customers.
Generally the interaction is pretty lightweight.

Think of your sites as a bar and you’ll realise that they require a lot of upkeep and support
after launch.

Sharing 30

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snapeverything/3096012196/sizes/l/

Make those nouns and their actions opportunities to share.
Turning lumps of text into meaningful objects that people can have social interactions around
can shift you from being a supplier to being a service provider.

Creating easy a!ordances so that people can build on top of your content and share these
creations gives people a reason to return to you.

This is possible in many areas, travel, hobbies, sport, cookery, it is harder in fiction, but the
fanfic movement shows it is possible even there.

Discoverability 31

The last part of this jigsaw is making this content discoverable.
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/paulthewineguy/2329382156/sizes/l/

There are two sides to that.
Personally relevant, things my friends have made or said

Interesting, generally the good stu! should ﬂoat to the top.
But top of what?
Search queries, groups, tags – any of the metadata used to describe this content should be
allowed to acts as a means of surfacing new great content.

Integration 32

Once people have these social objects they will want to put them elsewhere on the web.

Create an API so that people can repurpose their content on their site.
Support common standards like OpenID and OAuth.

Integrate with other services as appropriate, eg Twitter.

Recipes 33

http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangejon/2132468807/sizes/l/
A quick example, I like cooking.

Imagine you had a catalogue of recipe books.
How might you take these and turn them into useful social objects, but maybe not give away
all of the content for free?
V1 - buy these book, because other people bought them (amazon model), good but impersonal
V2 - list books you own and find people like you (a personal layer on top of book sales)
V3 - recipes I cooked (music tracks also), list and rate specific recipes, main ingredients (about cooking and people)

Notice the shift from Book purchasing
to similar people
to actual cooking and social interaction.

Perhaps allowing commenting and suggested alterations to the recipe?
Ingredients etc become the entry points to the recipies

34

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/2328879637/sizes/l/
“user driven media” IFTF Bob Stein

What I’m proposing is a shift towards reader interaction.
Publishers are still valuable as subject specialists.

The slow shift towards digital books and the rising expectations of our readership should be
pushing publishers towards developing a richer relationship.

Yet change is hard and we are strongly resistant to it.

Brokering relationships 35
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2831868995/
Many publisher brands have got themselves into this position
There is no voice to represent the brand anymore.

Give it individuality and draw authors to this unique identity
It works in travel and technical books, so why not elsewhere?

Tie back into the long tail and community
Brand vs imprint vs author
Many of your own brands are impersonal, your need to make these something to relate to
make your distinctive imprint brand part of the fat head.

support your author for sure, but the relationship between author, brand and publisher can
find a firm basis in the activities which spring from the books, rather than being tied to the
book.

• You know your role is changing
• Build meaningful relationships
• Think service not sale
• Let your content become building blocks
• Engage with the activity in your community

Takeaways 36

http://ﬂickr.com/photos/johnwesleybarker/215488418/sizes/o/

Engaging with the people who live in the long tail should lead to longer term relationships
and better content being generated, some of that will become books you can sell again.

flickr.com/photos/artcriminal/1249601513
flickr.com/photos/paopix/194178681
flickr.com/photos/xrm0/2479540688
flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2283392272
flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3199655294
flickr.com/photos/beesparkle/111324645/
flickr.com/photos/midiman/284804050
flickr.com/photos/tnkgrl/2555922960
flickr.com/photos/bispham2/1415787067
flickr.com/photos/53264755@N00/2782983222
flickr.com/photos/cobra/5465955
flickr.com/photos/cobra/5465940
flickr.com/photos/fil/247295019
flickr.com/photos/pensiero/1473000980
flickr.com/photos/aldoaldoz/2833634876
flickr.com/photos/nebneb/101601957
flickr.com/photos/76301418@N00/109909940/
flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/613445810
flickr.com/photos/orangejon/2132468807
flickr.com/photos/snapeverything/3096012196
flickr.com/photos/paulthewineguy/2329382156
flickr.com/photos/smudie/2724935036/
flickr.com/photos/spursfan_ace/2328879637
flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2831868995/
flickr.com/photos/johnwesleybarker/215488418

Thanks for the photos 37

If you want to continue this discussion:
gavinbell.com, me@gavinbell.com
twitter.com/zzgavin
slideshare.net/gavin
Building Social Web Applications will be
published this summer, isbn 0-596-51875-7

Thanks 38

Gavin Bell Toc09 Long Tail Needs Community Sm

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