A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It’s easy to think not much has changed.
But book publishing isn’t about printing, and it’s a useful metaphor for the systems changes we’re seeing all around us.
The book publishing system was based on scarcity.
A successful bookstore was perfect. It had exactly the right number of books — more wouldn’t fit, and fewer wouldn’t pay the rent. The only way for a book publisher to get a new book into the stores was to get the bookseller to take an old book out.
As a result of this chokepoint, distribution became the focus. Publishers came to see bookstores, not readers, as their customers—which is why there are few ads for books, or toll-free numbers to call. There were plenty of authors, so publishers selected which ones got a distribution investment. And their timing and launch strategies all revolved around the bookstores.
Bookstores have to make smart choices. Months in advance, they choose which new books to take on (and which to leave behind.) If they were wrong, if a new book they don’t carry has an audience, then they lose sales because readers go elsewhere.
The small change? Get rid of the scarcity of shelf space. Amazon never removes a book to make room for a new book. They have all the books.
The publishers’ existing strategies make little sense when the scarcity of shelf space goes away.
One industry term is the “lay down” which describes how many books a major publisher needs to print and distribute to get good nationwide coverage at launch. For books that hope to be bestsellers, that number was 25,000 copies or so… a book from a well-known author would have that many copies in the world before a single copy was sold.
Today, for many books like this, the laydown is 250. 1% of what it used to be.
This is why the industry is shifting so much attention to pre-orders. The online world not only eradicated space (you can buy things from anywhere, so shelves don’t matter), it also shifted time. You can indicate interest by buying things long before they’re distributed.
Bookstores don’t stock a new book unless they see it’s already been selling online.
Another example: Pop music.
Through a happy accident, the typical record store was exactly big enough to hold all the music that the typical listener might ever hear on the radio. The radio as a sampling medium was about the same size as the physical distribution medium of the store. You didn’t hear hula music on the radio and you couldn’t buy it at Tower Records.
First, we blew up the store. The internet meant that any song you wanted, you could download for free if you cared enough, or listen to it on YouTube (if you only cared a little.)
Then, we blew up the radio station. The internet meant that the sampling medium went from DJ-curated to streaming-on-demand. And we demanded.
Change the distribution, change the medium.
There are still hits, but they’re not driven by A&R teams, record-store distribution deals or payola. The sampling medium and the revenue medium have become the same.
And one more shift, one that’s changed both industries:
The cost of making a book or a song has plummeted. Thanks to AI, autotune and other tools, combined with the roll-your-own distribution of ebooks and social media, anyone can create and self-publish. So, anyone will.
Scarcity of creation and scarcity of distribution have been replaced by a surplus of both.
What doesn’t scale? Trust, attention and belonging.
AI is making relatively small changes to very big systems, everywhere we look. But if those systems are built on the desires of humans, we will need to earn trust, attention and belonging more than ever before.
Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism.
Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one.
The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding did (plus a little more).
The status ratchet is real, and it’s easy to be seduced by it. “Compared to what” is a fundamental component of marketing.
One reason this works is that a little progress gets you positive feedback, which makes you eager to find a little more, a cycle that doesn’t end. Infinity, all the way up.
And, for those seeking social change, the opposite is worth noting:
When asking for penance, self-control and good behavior, infinity is not a useful tool. When someone shows up and tries to do better, “that’s not good enough,” is not a particularly useful motivator.
The useful process begins by earning enrollment in the journey toward better, but it’s not amplified by our criticism of each action being imperfect.
Go-up infinity is about ‘more.’ But too often, social-good infinity is about ‘pure’. And pure is difficult to embrace, because anything less than pure feels like failure.
A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team?
Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause?
Does calling it a “donation” make it more valuable or less valuable to us?
Fundraisers can fall into the trap of believing that they’re asking for a favor or begging for a donation. But human beings, like all creatures, exchange time, money or risk in return for something. When that exchange is insufficient to cause action, we don’t do it.
The anonymous donor gets something. Something priceless, memorable and worthwhile: peace of mind.
The public donor, whether it’s the neighbor buying a raffle ticket for the scout fundraiser or the bigwig on the board of a museum, they get something as well. The status and connection they buy is a bargain, worth more than it costs. In fact, if it wasn’t worth more than it costs, they wouldn’t buy it.
The fundraiser isn’t asking for a favor. They’re offering an opportunity.
Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don’t know, and who aren’t particularly good at decision making.
Others do their best work when the customer knows what’s up and is making an informed choice.
Are you closing the sale or opening it?
If your prospects knew everything you know, would they choose you?
When marketers sign up for the iterative process of education and sophistication, our path is clear.
And if we sign up to confuse and manipulate, that path is clear as well.
That’s the wrong question to consider when proposing a study.
It’s also not helpful to say, “It’s unlikely to solve the problem.”
All the likely approaches have already been tried.
The useful steps are:
Is there a problem worth solving?
Is the expense of this test reasonable?
Will the study cause significant damage?
Of all the things we can test, is this a sensible one to try next?
Our fear of failure is real. It’s often so significant that we’d rather live with a problem than face the possibility that our new approach might be wrong.
If the problem is worth solving, it’s probably worth the effort and risk that the next unproven test will require.
[In this podcast, Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein talks with some patients and a doctor about his novel approach to Parkinson’s disease. Participants in the conversation bring up the conventional wisdom he’s challenging and share reasons why his theory probably won’t work. But none of the critics has a better alternative. The cost of the test is relatively low, and the stakes of the problem are quite high. There’s no clear answer. This is precisely what a study is for.]
What will it cost to test your solution to our problem? Okay, begin.
We spend most of the time we’re in school extinguishing imagination. “Will this be on the test?” is a much more common question than “What if?” We’ve been trained to do tasks in a factory.
Imagination is a skill and it takes effort.
It’s not useful to say, “I’m not imaginative.”
It’s more accurate to realize that we might not care enough to get good at it, or to put in the effort it takes.
As tasks continue to be automated, the hard work of imagination is worth investing effort in.
It used to be an obscure oddity, now we all need to understand it.
18 years ago, I posted this image:
…and I still can’t get it out of my head. Sorry.
Why do we have such a creeped-out reaction to images that aren’t quite right? A robot that looks too much like a person, or a song that we can somehow tell has an AI voice.
The creepiness predates AI, and was first named in a paper by Mori fifty years ago. But it’s so visceral that it almost certainly originated along with our fear of snakes and other evolutionary safeguards.
There are probably two things going on.
First, there’s a corpse alert. Corpses are dangerous, and something that’s alive/not alive is a warning sign. Same thing with zombies.
Second, imposter alert. Imposters are even more dangerous than predators, and we honed our imposter-detection skills a long time ago.
And now, everyone has AI available to them, and many of us are churning out experiences that border on the uncanny valley.
Not many people care about an automated drum track on a pop single, but we get uncomfortable when the lead singer isn’t quite human. We don’t mind when a website figures out our zip code for us, but when a bot apologizes for a late shipment, it means less than nothing. We’re okay with animation, but not with an educational video that combines beautifully shot real footage with an animated human that’s almost but not quite real…
While it’s possible to get used to snakes, and, perhaps, to corpses, I’m not sure that the general population is in any hurry to get used to either, or to the uncanny valley.
It’s likely that AI quality will increase fast enough that many of the most egregious valley moments will stop happening. But none of that will help with the expectation chasm. When you install an AI admin, or use AI for customer service or therapy, we will always end up with a valley sooner or later.
The solution is simple but takes effort: don’t fake it. Celebrate your genre, make a promise and keep it. Not in the way we need to label the ingredients in food, but simply to avoid the surprise realization, to protect your customers from the ick. Triggering an evolutionary survival mechanism is rarely good for your career.
“I confused and alienated people as I worked to save money trying to get them to think this was a person” is not much of a mission statement. Our job is to find problems and solve them, not to hustle our way with shortcuts that feel creepy.
This is where empathy lies, and it’s an easy chasm to fall into.
“I can’t imagine eating durian ice cream,” is not the same as “no one likes durian ice cream.”
We fail as marketers, editors and project managers when we can’t find the empathy to bridge the gap. It’s a lovely shortcut to make things for yourself, to imagine that you are the client, the reader or the customer. But most of the time, you’re not.
Setting out to make something popular requires only a focus on the crowd and on the moment. Most pop music is popular simply because that’s what it was built to do.
Good work can be good without being popular. And so the two goals aren’t easily aligned.
It helps to begin by becoming comfortable with what good feels like to you. Because conflating it with popular is a trap.
March 2, 2026
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