Tag: amazon

one possible future of the book

The latest Amazon Kindle deletion hoo-ha involves erotic incest fiction removed from users’ devices. This, apparently, is the kind of knowledge I process in my dreams, because I woke up in the middle of the night thinking —

Here we are in the future, when ereading is the norm. But our behemoth ebooksellers, skittish or outright paternalistic about content, prefer not to sell porn. Fetish porn, especially. Or, having inadvertently sold it under a self-publishing platform, they delete it from devices.

Our fetish porn readers of the future — concerned about their data security and property rights — therefore, naturally, turn to physical books for that slice of their reading.

And thus we have a world where reading is on devices except for the whispered topics, the things we hide from children and our neighbors. Physical books are things to read furtively; they connote disrepute. Quite the opposite of today’s notion of books as talismans.

shoe shopping, the long tail, and libraries

I hate shoe shopping.

I know — this is grounds for eviction from my gender. But if you’d once gone into every shoe store in your hometown, asked if they’d sold your size, and they all said “no”, you’d hate shoe shopping too.

(I wear an 8.5AA, and basically no one sells — or manufactures — narrows. Note that I say I wear a AA, not that I am one, because in fact my left foot is a AAA or a AAAA, and my right is an AAAA in the heel but an A through the toes, because I have six of them. AA — which you note is the correct size for me nowhere — is my compromise. I was in my twenties before I realized it was possible to own dress shoes that did not make my feet bleed. Like I said, you’d hate shoe shopping too.)

Long story short: thank goodness for the internet. Maybe it’s not worth it for shoe stores, except specialty stores in major metro areas (thank goodness also for Nordstrom) to stock my size, but on the internet I can shop by my size and never have to see all those adorable shoes I will never be able to wear.

Funny thing, though: I was talking to @Zappos_Service yesterday and they mentioned that narrows tended to go out of stock as soon as they got them. Wait, what?

All this time I assumed that no one stocked my size because no one wears it, so there wasn’t an economic case for it. But apparently there is more demand for narrow shoes than vendors can meet and somehow the invisible hand is failing to make money off of this. Whuh?

I think what we have here is a problem of perception. When I talk to people who don’t wear narrow shoes (particularly people with wide feet) they don’t realize I have a problem finding shoes. They assume stores carry my size, and that finding narrows is easier than finding wides (demonstrably untrue). People, including shoe salespeople, will tell me that this brand runs narrow as if that is useful (it isn’t; please stop saying that).

So wait, how did my cranky rant have to do with libraries again? I mean, under normal circumstances I think of, e.g., Amazon as having a huge advantage over libraries on the long-tail front, for all that WorldCat and ILL and consortial borrowing help with that.

Eric Hellman posited recently that a library is a collection organized for the benefit of its community. And it’s that spirit that’s generally lacking in my shoe-shopping travails. The profit motive should be enough…but it’s not, if people misunderstand the nature of the problem. If they think that stocking 8.5Bs that “run narrow” will result in sales to the narrow-footed among us, they will merrily stock them as their AA and AAA and AAAA widths fly off the shelves, unnoticed. What’s needed is some sort of conversation, where I can say, so yeah, I have these mutant feet, how can we work together to clarify assumptions? to bend the rules for me? And it’s that kind of conversation that, ideally, libraries — human intermediaries — are well-suited to provide.

In other words, the internet works great for you if you’re in the long tail of stuff that gets made. If you’re in the longer tail of stuff that doesn’t — if you need some sort of DIY, bespoke, creative solution — libraries can, at their best, make that work.

Library sherpas are great and all, but maybe I’d rather library MacGyvers.

where is my easy button?

So I just found out about this new book (Teaching as Leadership, in which Teach for America releases decades of data on what makes teachers effective, and yes I’m pretty much twitching with paroxysms of squeeee about this). It doesn’t come out until February, but hey, I can wait (…impatiently), and I’m fine with putting in a request for it through the library and getting it when I get it…

….except I can’t, because the library doesn’t have it yet, so a catalog search is fruitless.

Which, I mean, I’m also sort of OK with. Except…what happens to the information that I’ve searched for this book, and not found it? Does it just fall into the void somewhere? Is it collected in some useful way and acted upon? (Help me out here, O people who have studied collection development.)

And why is there not an easy button where I can say, hey, I want this book? Seems like fruitless searches should automatically yield a “suggest this for purchase” option.

While I’m on the topic, can anyone tell me how the Amazon preorder system works? Obviously Amazon is, in some way, cataloging and allowing requests for books it does not, in point of fact, have yet, and my library is not. (Leaving aside, for the moment, that Amazon’s catalog and search makes me want to stab things. And that my husband and I had a conversation about authority control issues with a record for a book that has apparently just been received by our local library system but not yet cataloged. This, if it works as a permalink.)