ve 'em something for nothing and make your fortuneRobert McCrum (The Bookman finds his weekly Observer columns consistently thoughtful and well constructed)
The Observer, Sunday 21 June 2009
Are these the best of times or the worst of times? In a confusing decade, in which the consumer feels lost in a blizzard of conflicting information, there's a huge market for simplified intelligence, ideally in the English language. If there's one genre that sells and sells, it is the little book that purports to Explain Everything.
The zen master of this genre is Malcolm Gladwell whose perennial American bestsellers, The Tipping Point and Blink, take a couple of universal phenomena ("word of mouth" and "first impressions") and subject them to a brilliant and seductive analysis that simultaneously soothes and provokes the reader. Other titles in this genre include Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics.
Typically, such a book does three things. First, it tells stories. Second, through analytical parables, it explicates a new and troubling situation. Third, it says that the perverse and often baffling world in which we find ourselves can, after all, become manageable. It's
no coincidence that this genre has flourished at a time of astonishing technological, economic and social innovation. Not only does the millennial world seem confusing, the new century also seems to threaten the foundations of the old order. Nothing can be taken for granted. Climate? The sky is falling. Credit? We're bankrupt. The printed word? Everything will be virtual.
Typically, such a book does three things. First, it tells stories. Second, through analytical parables, it explicates a new and troubling situation. Third, it says that the perverse and often baffling world in which we find ourselves can, after all, become manageable. It's
no coincidence that this genre has flourished at a time of astonishing technological, economic and social innovation. Not only does the millennial world seem confusing, the new century also seems to threaten the foundations of the old order. Nothing can be taken for granted. Climate? The sky is falling. Credit? We're bankrupt. The printed word? Everything will be virtual. California, which has occasionally advertised itself as "the state where the future happens first", is the home of radical contributions to the Everything Explained genre.
In the summer of 2006, Chris Anderson, the Californian editor of magazine Wired, published The Long Tail, a provocative account of niche marketing that seemed to offer new hope to retailers (like booksellers) with slow-selling stock. Three years on, he has just married two interests - the behaviour of the marketplace and the dynamics of the internet - in a new book, Free, published by Random House on 2 July.
Anderson opens his account, in the best traditions of the genre, with the story of Monty Python. In 2008, incensed by the piracy of their videos, the Pythons posted an announcement on YouTube: the launch of a Monty Python channel from which everyone could download everything for free. The upshot of this piece of commercial suicide has been, apparently, a 2,300% increase in sales of Pythoniana.
Read the rest of McCrum's column here.
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