In 2004, I had two ideas that seemed capable of greatly changing the publishing industry.

The first sought to take advantage of the versatility and platform-independence of the internet to create software that could permit the remote, collaborative authoring of niche, non-fiction works with subscribers editing using only their web browsers.

The second sought to take advantage of increased efficiency in automated book perfect binding in order to create a print-on-demand publishing house capable of finding the margin in single book printing runs.

In the case of the first idea, I quickly discovered the existence of the open source MediaWiki project, which had already developed my envisioned software, and was giving it away for free. As an aside, this encounter shortly led to my first experience with Wikipedia, where a robust collaboration on non-fiction (as well as a bit of fiction) works was already under way.

It was while researching the second idea that I discovered something so impactful as to make me forget all about the second idea.

It happened while trying to figure out how big the market for non-best sellers – specifically, books that sell fewer than 10,000 copies – really is.

What I found is that we have almost no way of knowing exactly how many copies of non-best sellers are sold, because publishers keep that information to themselves.

My next step was to attempt to extrapolate an approximation of the number through a study of Amazon.com’s daily book sales rankings.

Sornette found the “Power Law” manifest in book sales.

Along the way, I bumped into the work of UCLA professor Didier Sornette and his 2003 study, Endogenous Versus Exogenous Shocks in Complex Networks, which demonstrated that, in response to advertising (an exogenous shock) or word of mouth (an endogenous shock), a book’s Amazon.com sales ranking will spike and then recede in a manner predicted by the “power law” equation of y=1/x, where y=sales per day, and x=time.

Even more significant is the fact that such power law relationships are seen over and over again in nature, including seismology, which is why Sornette, himself a seismologist and author of books listed on Amazon.com, first noticed the familiar pattern.

As the study states,

“For something that may seem as random and unpredictable as book sales, we find that a simple generic model can give a very good prediction as to how customers will behave.”

The realization that book sales are subject to a specific law of nature was a revelation, and got me thinking about what else might be.

Pre-Web 2.0 economies artificially truncated the shape of consumer demand.

What I found is that everything relating to consumer choice manifests itself through power laws. But, in the case of media, limits on choice imposed by the economic barriers of production, distribution and inventory have long saddled mankind with a rudely truncated version of the curve.

What Sornette could not have known was that within days of publishing his paper, the maturation of the web and increased availability of bandwidth would combine with humanity’s demand for niche media options in seismic ways: resulting in the birth of Web 2.0.

At the same time I was figuring this stuff out, so was Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson, who would go on to publish his book describing this phenomenon, appropriately called The Long Tail, about 18 months later.

Web 2.0 technologies open media up on the far end of the tail.

The speed with which Web 2.0 came into full-blown existence is in large part the reason this latest consumer-focused media revolution has come into being free of the expected restraining forces – normally offered by order-injecting referee institutions. Hence, not only must Web 2.0 content be largely user-generated, so too the means of protecting truth and reputations.

Hence, just as certainly as tomorrow the sun will rise in the east, what we know about the power law suggests consumers will inevitably continue to leave mainstream sources of media for more social, long tail alternatives. Meanwhile, what we know about human nature suggests some small portion of long-tail content creators will abuse their media.

So far the only thing that appears less than inevitable is the emergence of an institutionalized means of holding abusers to account. Certainly, Akahele is one effort to impose some responsibility, but I suspect those of us who founded this blog would just as soon see it become obsolete in the shadow of a true alternative.