Unlike some of my smarter, more Amazon.com-friendly classmates, I didn’t purchase all the books for this class ahead of time. Dumb. Very dumb. This weekend, while trying to locate the book for this week’s reading (John Battelle’s The Search), I found myself reliving life as it existed before search engines made the long tail available to us.
I got it in my head that I could just go to a bookstore, pick up a copy of the book, go home and start reading. That all sounds really doable. The problem was, our weekly reading wasn’t on the best-sellers list (read: not a book that book sellers are going out of their way to keep in stock). The ol’ brick-and-mortar limitation was at work — against me.
The first bookstore I stopped at had a helpful person working, but when I asked if they had a copy of the book, the inventory SEARCH engine found no book by that title. I said thanks, got back in my car, found the next bookstore in my navigation system (okay, I did have the benefit of one modern assistant), and drove on. About 10 miles later, I got to the next bookstore, parked my car, took an elevator to the appropriate level, went into the bookstore, asked the clerk if they had the book. He looked at me with a puzzled look on his face, no doubt wondering if there was more to the title. Once I told him The Search was the whole title, he explained how long it would take his SEARCH engine to find out if they had in stock a book whose title included the word “search.” After about 10 minutes, he told me they didn’t (although his search engine did bring back more than 4,000 books with the word “search” in the title. Um, thanks.) So I took the elevator back to the appropriate level, got back in my car, plugged another bookstore in, and headed off. This store would be my last stop on my unintentional trip down memory lane.
The old way netted me nothing and cost me nearly three hours (and some gas). Once I finally gave up that ridiculous plan, I turned to the ever-present Google, which helped me find a bookstore with the book in stock within about 10 minutes and two miles of my house.
Fortunately I found the book, or I would never have known how potentially dangerous Google is. (Author’s note: I think I’ll take my chances with Google, and I’ll be buying the rest of my books on Amazon.com. Thank God for the long tail.)
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