Riding the long tail
2009-03-20A professor at INSEAD has come up with a system that generates tomes full of stuff on obscure topics, and sells them on Amazon, only printing them when they’re ordered.
Supposedly, he has over 200,000 books available, with such racy titles as “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats, and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India“.
This article includes a video by the author, talking about his book “writing” process, and also about his ambitions for automatically-generated video games, teaching and game shows.
Not everyone is happy about what he’s doing, though.
I wonder if Jeffrey Archer knows about this.
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The Amazon reviews are worth reading. Except for the odd po-faced “it’s an algorithm” review, of course. In fact, “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Consumer Non-Riding Dual-Stage Snow Throwers and Snow Blowers Excluding Attachment Type in India” gets a unanimous 5 stars.
And of course, I couldn’t resist clicking on “I’d like to read this book on Kindle”.
And here are some extracts from the comments:
Actually, given that Amazon lists these $500 titles as being “in stock”, I wonder if the business model here is just: “stuff amazon.com’s catalogue with ludicrously expensive books, each of which they’ll buy one copy of for stock (and maybe even sell, eventually).”
So perhaps it’s just a way of gaming a large-scale book distribution system.