New Literacy and the Commoditization of Content

This summer, Wired ran an article by Clive Thompson on the New Literacy. From 2001 to 2006, Andrea Lunsford studied nearly 15,000 college students' writing behaviors, in and out of the class room, in the Stanford Study of Writing. She found that people are writing more often and writing more effectively to their audiences than ever before, concluding that we are "in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." While I am skeptical that a sample population of Stanford college students is sufficiently representative of the rest of the world, it does make sense that emailing, texting, blogging, and social networking have increased how much we write every day.

In response to this five-year study, I have conducted my own five-minute study, Celeste Fine's Study of Reading, in which I similarly interviewed a much more sophisticated sample of seven people from my Tuesday night pool team and discovered that this New Literacy has also significantly increased how much we read every day. My unsubstantiated conclusion: people are also reading more than ever.

As a literary agent, I am particularly interested in how this New Literacy affects the book industry. Maybe sales for traditional formats, like books, aren't low because the demand for reading is low but because the supply of written content in our everyday lives is at an all-time high (Take that, Steve Jobs). The Stanford Study also found that people are writing more succinctly -- status updates, text messages, blogs -- which creates a double supply whammy: people are writing more and increasingly compact content is quicker to produce.

The Internet has also made written content more readily available and for cheap -- free even. The Internet is a low-cost distribution channel that gives writers and readers easy access to each other. So the likes of Perez Hilton can compete with the distribution of premium brands like the New York Times at little to no cost. These low costs are in-turn enjoyed by readers, who can base their reading choices heavily on price, creating a perfect competition for readers. Check out this Paid Content: UK's study with Harris Interactive that shows 74% of people who read free online news would simply switch to a free source if their favorite news site began to charge. Sorry, Rupert Murdoch, but if you bill it, they may not come.

An increased supply, low costs, and few barriers to distribution may have basically commoditized written content and therefore the book industry. If that's the case, perhaps the book industry can learn a thing or two from other commoditized industries.

Let's head from Stanford to USC and take a look at Martin Reimann's "Industry commoditization: Its nature and role in competitive strategy," which explored commoditization across several industries, from energy to underwear. This study found that different marketing strategies are successful based on the level of commoditization in an industry. They found that customer intimacy -- creating value by focusing on customers' specific needs and meeting them -- is the most successful marketing tool in a highly commoditized industry. Operational excellence was second. Both were more important than product leadership, which corresponds to innovation in the actual product.

Let's think of written content as a product and the time and energy a writer spends on writing as operations. Let's consider the writing style and format the writer's way of marketing her product to readers (her customers). According to Martin Reimann's study, if written content is highly commoditized, the most successful writer will focus on her reader and streamline her writing to improve efficiency, which happens to correspond to Andrea Lunsford's description of the New Literacy: focusing on the audience and writing more efficiently. This New Literacy could be the reflection of writers competing for readers in a highly commoditized environment.

So maybe reading isn't dead. Perhaps we aren't lazy couch potatoes lacking the attention span to read. This New Literacy may show that writers are already responding to the commoditization of written content, and the most successful book publishers will be the ones that follow suit and focus on publishing books in a way that better understands and meets readers' specific needs. Perhaps product innovations, like books with video, are only as successful as they pertain to customer intimacy, and the future of books isn't inventing a better book but better meeting readers' needs.

One Fine Question: What do you want from a book?

Comments

[TrueSmallCaps]

I agree with you to some extent, but I think it's due to more than the internet. It's also due to the mushrooming number of titles being published.

Oddly, branded products (i.e., books by name authors or celebrities) actually have a LOWER value than books by unknown authors. The books by unknowns have a street price of $15 or $20. The big bestsellers are changing hands at under $10 (Amazon, Walmart).

In commodity markets, where price is everything, the competitive advantage goes to the lowest-cost producer.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the more labor-intensive parts of book publishing outsourced to countries with low labor costs.

[Keith Thomson - Huffpost Blogger]

One out of one former Stanford Writing students I polled agreed with you. And figured that hope for the rise of literacy simply would be found the increase in internet usage versus the decline in television consumption. But he was mistaken.

At this juncture in 2008, according to Neilsen, the average American was watching approximately 142 hours of TV per month — 5 hours more than he watched in a typical month during the same period one year earlier. Meanwhile, Americans used the Internet 27 hours per month, an increase 40 minutes over the previous year, but one that was negated by the rise of video on the internet, up nearly an hour during that frame, and, of course, skyrocketing.

So I guess the question is: What next?

And the bigger one: Where do people find these 167 hours per month?

[Celeste Fine - Huffpost Blogger]

Is video necessarily competing with reading?

[Keith Thomson - Huffpost Blogger]

Not necessarily, but given that typical letters home from 18-year-old Civil War soldiers read like prose on today's Pulitzer short list, presumably there's a stronger correlation between reading and literacy, and the more time spent watching video on the Web=less time spent reading on the Web. Or do social networking and videos have a literacy X factor?

[everagland]

Thought provoking. I'd like to hear more from Celest Fine.

[jfaustus]

Interesting take. As a voracious reader (and participant in Ms. Fine's highly scientific Manhattan study), I've noticed two deficiencies in the weblogogooglesphere that usually send me to the bookshelf: completeness and expertise. Surfing thousands of 200- to 600-word articles is fine, but it leaves you with a feeling you've missed something, some crucial point that you'll find only in the next post. I think that searching for the little-bit-more is a big part of what drives relentless blog surfing. And let's face it, many self-publishers on the tubes are smart people, good writers, and savvy marketers -- who may even know something of which they speak. But when I want to feel like I have a complete grasp on something, I'll look for a book-length treatment by someone who can be counted on to know every nook and cranny of the subject matter.

Unfortunately, that's a damn hard thing to commoditize. The thing with underwear is that most everyone who buys it wants the same thing. (Let's not spend too much time dwelling on the outlying cases, okay?) Not at all true of bookbuyers, who may be looking for a definitive history of the Portuguese colonization of East Timor, or an ilumination of the finer points of euchre, or a hagiography of their favorite politician. So how do you make something as inherently diverse as the content of books into a commodity? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure I would want to find out.

[Celeste Fine - Huffpost Blogger]

I think traditional thinking would agree with you that there is a difference in the quality of content. But I wonder if the innundation of ideas and content in the whole spectrum of written formats on the micro level means that the quality of the content is less important than its customization to readers' individual needs on the macro level. I think the fact that most readers in that Harris Interactive poll would drop their favorite online news source rather than pay for it, might support that thinking.

[Celeste Ng - Huffpost Blogger]

What an interesting post and an interesting way of looking at the situation. In this analogy, if written content is the product and the time and energy spent writing is operations, then innovation in the writing itself--new ideas, new styles, new stories--are product leadership. And that would mean that whether a book is doing something new is least important.