Samuel Fine:

The tumblelogging phenomenon is an interesting solution to the major problem with capital-b Blogging: that humans are intensely diverse and complicated beings, and consistent long-form articles are both impractical and inadequate for the type of creative expression toward which most people strive. In short, I don’t want to write 3 paragraphs about every day of my life, and you probably don’t want to read it. There are better ways to get the job done, and tumblelogging is one of them.

Tumblelogs are an attempt to capture the diverse forms of expression that the web affords; a way to present a reconstructed portrait of our fractured online personalities. This is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, and the problem continues to worsen as we are presented with a rapidly-climing number of ways to put ourselves online. Now that tumblelogging has had an official name for just under four years, I think it’s been long enough that we can make some judgements regarding the format’s success.

Tumblelogging’s most obvious win is that it provides a simple way to share whatever happens to be on your mind at a given moment, with no concern for editing or choosing the appropriate service or anything like that — as Jason Kottke said, A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. For services like Tumblr and Soup, the user need only choose the type of entry (image, quote, link…) and drop in one or two pieces of information.

But there’s always a downside. I’m not the sort that cries about the loss of some likely-imagined higher level of Quality that was part of restricting self-expression to those with more money and technical knowledge; instead, I’m primarily concerned with the increased volume of output that tumblelogs encourage. I don’t necessarily see this as a fault, but I do feel that it means current tumblelog implementations have served to worsen the problem of the reconstructed portrait I mentioned above.

I’ll grant that this may not be a fatal flaw — at least for the moment — but I see potential for the idea to be more than the current ‘post it all here!’ approach. I see tumblelogs being something more like Phil Gyford’s technique of publishing content on a variety of dedicated services, then pulling it all back together to show what was done on a certain day.

But more importantly, I prefer the curated approach. While this reduces the immediacy and freedom, it’s also a mindset that encourages the user to spread meaning. Casual sharing is better done with bookmarks and favorites, where the effort needed is equal to one’s interest.

There’s value in being able to click a few times and share anything at all; there’s more value in sharing stuff that matters.

In the roughly two decades the Web has existed, we’ve all been participating in an experiment to see what happens with post-scarcity goods: things that can be reproduced infinitely, at effectively zero cost for reproduction, distribution, or consumption. The most obvious result is that printed newspapers are dying, because they try to be as temporarily-relevant and discardable as email. To be sure, it’s hard for an kid in a bedroom to make a product as high-quality as the New York Times, and even harder to get good reporting from around the world. Journalism is difficult.

But the existence of newspapers is founded in the fact that, for a span of several hundreds of years, they were the most efficient way to deliver information. Much like the record business, though, they’ve suddenly discovered that more efficient delivery mechanisms are possible. Not only possible, but far simpler and more desirable for everybody involved.

This realization isn’t limited to news and music, though. What of the book?

While not an especially efficient information carrier, books can provide an experience that is — for the moment, anyhow — impossible to match. They’re dense, they’re easily transported, they have a high visual resolution, they’re coherent.

But just like newspapers and records, their existence is predicated on the idea of scarcity.

‘MEME 1.06’, David Bennahum, 01995

When a library becomes a digital library, a lot of things change. In a nutshell, it starts to look just like a publisher. It actually becomes a competitor to the likes of HarperCollins and Random House. First of all, you no longer have to physically go to the library to get the information. You can read it on-screen. Second, there is no theoretical limit of the number of people who can “borrow” the same book once the book is in bit form. In such a world, a publisher has good reason to rescind the bond between publisher, library and reader. In the old days that bond meant publishers tolerated libraries on one condition — that the library not charge for reading books. This guaranteed that the library’s commercial impact on publishers remained negligible. But with a digital library, if the choice is publisher.com or library.net — what are you going to choose? At library.net you can read the same book for free. At publisher.com they’ll bill you. Both are a mouse click away, both have the same content you want. But one is free and the other isn’t. So, it is no surprise that publishers are simply refusing to give libraries electronic rights; or, if the library is fortunate, it gets to lease the electronic rights on a renewable basis — thereby gutting the library of another precious asset: its ability to build a collection.

---

So what can you do when scarcity ceases to be a factor? One possibility I’ve noticed recently is shifting these analog goods into being desirable as objects, rather than just serving as an information medium — not unlike signed copies of a painting.

I first picked up this thread in an op. ed. piece by James Gleick:

One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, Johannes Gutenberg, and now goodbye.)

But I don’t see it that way. I think, on the contrary, we’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology. Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again (it was never a good way to get rich), but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms.

…

In bookstores, the trend for a decade or more has been toward shorter shelf life. Books have had to sell fast or move aside. Now even modest titles have been granted a gift of unlimited longevity.

What should an old-fashioned book publisher do with this gift? Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.

Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.

---

But what about libraries?

I think this is a place that the curated approach would work well. It’s impossible to compete on quantity when your opponent has, say, 85% of everything ever printed. But you can compete on selection. Anybody who can consistently share good products — in this case, shelf choices — will develop an audience.

Is there a business model in it? I don’t know, but it can’t be much worse than the current approach of endowments and government funding. Maybe they could run book clubs based around rediscovering classic or forgotten titles and charge a membership fee.

Books aren’t dead unless publishers refuse to keep them alive.

I’m intrigued by the idea of curated retail — presenting the customer with a careful selection of goods, rather than simply displaying products from anybody who fills categories or will cut a good distribution deal.

Every display is carefully executed and every piece of merchandise is carefully edited, according to Gordon Segal. He believes that a specialty retailer has a point of view vs. a department store, which tries to be all things to all people. We’re editors, we’re selectors. We make it easier for the consumer to find a particular variety of product. If you like French traditional, you don’t come to Crate and Barrel. If you want contemporary, you might come to us or any of our competitors, but you know what we stand for.

Related: Monocle’s video report on Bildschöne Bücher.