Last year, Anita Elberse, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard University (and previously one of Anderson’s collaborators), used data from American DVD and music retail sectors to argue that the Internet has augmented the chunk of the pie eaten up by just a few bestselling items. According to Elberse, the truth about bestselling books, movies, DVDs — or, for that matter, Sarah Palin’s rimless glasses or Michelle Obama’s J. Crew inauguration gloves — is that customers who may make only one or two purchases a year are the ones who create bestsellers. Inveterate readers, filmgoers, and lovers of music may buy fifty times as many items over the course of a year, but they repre-sent only a tiny minority of purchasers.

The great majority of customers who venture online to shop just occasionally — the ones all publishers want — are not flocking to some obscure item hidden in the intricacies of the Long Tail, but to buy an item that is already up front and bestselling. They are doing so because the book, the CD, or the movie is, in fact, the secondary purchase. What these visitors are actually doing is buying a ticket to a conversation — and they want to be a part of it during that first weekend, month, or year, while it is current and dominating headlines and dinner table talk. “A book is more than words on a page,” says Joel Silver, the head buyer at Indigo Books & Music. “It takes eight to ten hours to read and it changes a person, but it also has a social application. It’s about how you wear it and how you pass it on. People want to show up at a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, have you read that? What do you think of it?’”

So the actual effect of the Internet on retail has been to propel fewer bestselling items into the fat front end of the action while reducing the sales of the innumerable products that make up the dwindling remainder. Think, for instance, of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, of the continued dominance of Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce (more than fifty weeks on the bestseller lists), or of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, a novel that has been selling in the range of 2,500 copies a week . Today, just a small number of books compete for consumers’ fleeting attention. The tail is longer, but it is also thinner. Backlist sales that for some publishers once provided 70 percent of sales now account for 30. Now, more than ever, a book needs to be part of the conversation if it is to sell.

t its core, the battle for readers is a zero-sum game. If the number of reading hours per person per year is constant, then Elberse’s qualification of Anderson’s Long Tail is bad news for small publishers and the majority of authors. But in the current recessionary climate, and in the US, especially, even large publishers are beginning to find that “pushing” hundreds of thousands of physical books at consumers who are increasingly accustomed to “pulling” what they want off the Internet is prohibitively expensive. HarperCollins announced that its US sales were down about 20 percent last year; to the extent that overprinting is part of a publisher’s economic model, a drop in real sales of that magnitude makes that strategy much more costly. The number of returned books — those that do not sell and are sent back to the publisher by the bookstores — must be factored into the cost of the units that do, as must the expense of physically storing these books, delivering them to stores across the country, and then paying for their shipment back to the warehouse and, ultimately, destroying them. When the “push” strategy coincides with popular appetites — the spike in sales of Julia Child’s memoir and cookbooks surrounding the release of the Nora Ephron movie Julie and Julia in August would be a case in point — it works well. But such outcomes are increasingly rare.

The diminished ability of the fat front end of the Long Tail to redeem such extravagances is as disappointing to the large publishers as the diminishing profits of its back end are to big and small ones alike. All publishers would prefer to be able to avail themselves of the massive amount of work they have invested in past titles, once the trade’s steady earner. But as if the effects of the new digital environment were not challenging enough, the problem for a publisher of a new book’s increasingly tenuous chance at being a part of the conversation is compounded by a concurrent web phenomenon at the lower end of the Long Tail that, in book publishing, has particularly masochistic aspects — and that is the problem of “free.”

Last February, Google announced that more than half a million “classics” (that is, public domain titles where no copyright is paid) would be available through its Book Search program. No other entertainment industry legitimately provides its proven backlist sellers gratis. Any recording of a work by Beethoven, Maria Callas, or Ernie Ford is going to cost something on iTunes — copyrights are traded and at the very least there will be a performer claiming dues. And yet in the book world great masters, such as Dickens, Tolstoy, or Austen, can be had for nothing. On Main Street, nearly free titles are available at second-hand and remainder stores. But the availability of a half million books for absolutely nothing — offered not just by Google but, in Canada, to purchasers of the Sony Reader — is presumably applying even more downward pressure at the thin end of the Long Tail, usurping more reading hours and dragging down the prices of e-books if and when publishers decide to produce them. And it’s not just a question of all those “classics,” or of all the in-copyright books that clever Internet sleuths can acquire somewhere without paying, but of “freemiums” as a strategy: last summer, for instance, when the fourth book in James Patterson’s series Maximum Ride was released, readers were offered the first one free as an e-book download. More bought reading time lost.

Then, in October 2008, Google settled a three-year legal battle with the Authors Guild and several publishers over the digitization of more than seven million books it was able to acquire by furnishing the American libraries from which they had been “borrowed” with PDF copies of the books in question. A book could end up in the incipient Google Books registry if even a single copy sits on a library shelf anywhere in America; the onus is on writers and publishers to alert Google that their books are in the collection, and that they are thus entitled to a portion of whatever revenue it generates.

By copying the books first and negotiating later, Google has, in effect, established itself as the biggest pirate in the world — imagine the political outcry if the Chinese had tried it. And while its copyright access agreement was fashioned in the United States, it affects publishers everywhere, though as yet the only state to have had the gumption to object is Germany, and the only major corporation is Amazon, a competitor that at least asks permission to scan. Now, however, the practice of obliging producers to claim their copyright is an industry model. In August, the illegal peer-to-peer, file-sharing website the Pirate Bay was purchased by the legitimate Swedish firm Global Gaming Factory, a company that is behaving exactly as Google is doing — posting first and settling later. Canadian authors affected by the Google settlement were given until September 4 to opt in or out, marking the moment when the webification of the Canadian publishing industry was no longer a theoretical debate.

Google’s copyright access agreement has vapourized previous ideas about “fair use” of a writer’s material and delivered a rude body blow to publishers that have historically traded territorial publishing rights as part of their portfolios. As with Amazon, 20 percent of a book may be viewed online, versus the limit of about 300 words that a newspaper, broadcast show, or magazine may excerpt without payment. Furthermore, if the edition of Gil Adamson’s The Outlander that Google may have acquired from a Vermont library just happens to be Australian, perhaps the donation of some generous relative passing through, then even if a subsequent online purchase is made from Canada, the royalty and other revenues will accrue to the Australian publisher and not the Canadian one. In the strange, borderless world of the Internet, it thus makes more and more sense for publishers to purchase world rights — assuming they can afford them.

At the moment, the income that stands to be generated from Google Books and its nascent registry comes from a cut of the advertising on a book’s associated web page, but the company has made clear that it is preparing for all sorts of revenue models in the future, from links to related sites to direct sales and digital downloads. Interestingly, it is even contemplating price “bins” in which books will be priced on a scale that rises and falls according to demand — a move that disregards the cost of producing a book entirely, with dire repercussion for publishers striving to recoup advances to authors and all the other costs of production that are required even in the electronic world.

With Google paving the way, all sorts of companies are joining in the melee. The website DailyLit.com sends chapters of selected books to computers, mobile reading devices, or cellphones in sequential parts, daily. Much of its repertoire is, at the moment, made up of “classics” (those free books again), but this includes, for instance, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, available in eleven parts for free — a piece of backlist that, what with the movie release, might have earned a tidy sum for its publishers. Dialabook.net, calling itself the “biggest excerpt distributor in the United States,” purveys the first chapters of, at last advertised count, 235,000 books to libraries and bookstores and other clients across the United States, charging publishers for the service.

In Canada, Mark Scott, the CEO of Douglas & McIntyre, has developed his own digitized book site; BookRiff allows readers to compile their own bound texts from individually purchased chapters as MP3 users would playlists. BookRiff seems an unlikely proposition beyond, perhaps, travellers wanting that ultimate guide to Borneo, cooks wanting an array of favourite recipes, and students collating a master reference text, but it is easy to imagine a lucrative future for it as a hand-held application. Indigo recently launched Shortcovers.com, a book sampling site that enables users to read first chapters of books for free and buy subsequent chapters at $0.99 a shot (or the entire book at market prices). “Mix, mash and match your favorite reads!” the site urges. “Compile collections of short stories, speeches, articles, interviews, chapters and more under your favorite themes. It’s the fastest way to organize and share content that motivates and inspires you.”