The print on demand model services are becoming more main stream and naturally are becoming central to the business model for a number of publishers. This is particularly true for those publishers who are willing to print what are likely to have small target audiences. One of the issues this raises is marketing. One of the ways libraries obtain books is through major book vendors who obtain a stock of the books and make them available through approval plans, etc. If a publisher publishes only through POD, a new form of marketing will be required…

Technology Rewrites the Book – New York Times
The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.

I’ll not try to summarize Lorcan’s rather long posting, but rather urge you to read it. Then read it again. I’ve been reading the long-tail postings for awhile, and have made several comments on this blog. Lorcan’s post is the most thoughtful comment about how Long Tail applies to libraries that I’ve read. It pushes us to think about a different business model for libraries.

I’ve read it once. I’m going to think about it and will probably comment on it in a future posting. For now, read it…

Chris Anderson’s post about emerging probablistic models for information management is an interesting comment on the accuracy debate surrounding wikipedia.

Is Wikipedia “authoritative”? Well, no. But what really is? Britannica is reviewed by a smaller group of reviewers with higher academic degrees on average. There are, to be sure, fewer (if any) total clunkers or fabrications than in Wikipedia. But it’s not infallible either; indeed, it’s a lot more flawed that we usually give it credit for.

Britannica’s biggest errors are of omission, not commission. It’s shallow in some categories and out of date in many others. And then there are the millions of entries that it simply doesn’t–and can’t, given its editorial process–have. But Wikipedia can scale to include those and many more. Today Wikipedia offers 860,000 articles in English – compared with Britannica’s 80,000 and Encarta’s 4,500. Tomorrow the gap will be far larger.

The idea of a “Long Tail” makes a lot of sense in the library world. Obviously we want to add popular books to the collection, but that kind of collection would be very small. A good library collection includes books that will be interesting to a wide variety of people over a long period of time….

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail
Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody. Not enough shelf space for all the CDs, DVDs, and games produced. Not enough screens to show all the available movies. Not enough channels to broadcast all the TV programs, not enough radio waves to play all the music created, and not enough hours in the day to squeeze everything out through either of those sets of slots.

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

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With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.