page138
116
cory doctorow
electronic text differs from a small one: it’s the difference be-
tween a single book, a shelf full of books, and a library of books.
Scale makes things different. Take the Web: none of us can hope
to read even a fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by analyz-
ing the link structures that bind all those pages together, Google
is able to actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about
the relative relevance of different pages to different queries. None
of us will ever eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for
us and excrete the steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the
search-engine miracle it is today.
8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books] To
round out this talk, I’d like to go over the ways that ebooks are
more like paper books than you’d expect. One of the truisms of
retail theory is that purchasers need to come into contact with
a good several times before they buy — seven contacts is tossed
around as the magic number. That means that my readers have to
hear the title, see the cover, pick up the book, read a review, and
so forth, seven times, on average, before they’re ready to buy.
There’s a temptation to view downloading a book as compa-
rable to bringing it home from the store, but that’s the wrong
metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, download-
ing the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store
and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advan-
tage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA
and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the
book before you). Some writers are horrified at the idea that three
hundred thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and
“only” ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that
for every copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that
would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another
way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of
Content 2nd gal final.indd 116
7/4/08 9:57:06 AM