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the interesting thing is the other 10 percent. Bill Gates told the
New York Times
that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing “a
good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the
other stuff. But it’s the remaining 20 percent that counts, because
that’s where the quality perception is.” Why did Napster capti-
vate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40 tracks
that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because
80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn’t available for sale
anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs
that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged
in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard
it. Those songs are different for all of us, but they share the trait
of making the difference between a compelling service and, well,
top-40 Clear Channel radio programming. It was the minority of
tracks that appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the
malleability of electronic text means that it can be readily repur-
posed: you can throw it on a webserver or convert it to a format
for your favorite PDA; you can ask your computer to read it aloud
or you can search the text for a quotation to cite in a book report
or to use in your sig. In other words, most people who download
the book do so for the predictable reason, and in a predictable
format — say, to sample a chapter in the HTML format before de-
ciding whether to buy the book — but the thing that differentiates
a boring etext experience from an exciting one is the minority use
— printing out a couple chapters of the book to bring to the beach
rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
Toolmakers and software designers are increasingly aware of
the notion of “affordances” in design. You can bash a nail into the
wall with any heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to
a cast-iron skillet. However, there’s something about a hammer
that cries out for nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its
holder towards swinging it. And, as we all know, when all you
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