The ‘long tail’ (which just like the word ‘internet’ is spelled with capital L and I throughout the book) is a bit of internet folklore by now: If there are many products available in a category, only the most popular ones will be profitable to sell in a physical store because the space needed to store each of them is finite and expensive. A supermarket shelf can only contain a certain number of products and a movie screen can only be used to screen one film at a time. With digital technologies and networks enabling companies to reduce their cost for storing products, by shipping them as bits and bytes (iTunes) or by letting other people store a small range of them (eBay) offering a more complete range becomes feasible. With more powerful search and classification/tagging systems, one can also provide customers a guide through the larger choice of products. The effect of that is that not just the ‘top 100’ products which sell in large quantities can be sold today but it has become feasible to sell more specialised stuff. Which is great for the people making the specialised stuff as well as the people wanting it. Voilà, the ‘long tail’.

The idea may have been tricky to pin down correctly (was it? didn’t all the ‘business’ ‘academics’ figure this out decades ago?) and simplify to such a nice punchline - apparently even using data of some online companies. But of course none of those data are actually seen in the book. Instead many words are in there. Coming at 250 pages I kept thinking that 50 pages may have communicated the same ideas as well, if not better, as it would have been less tiring and there would have been extra space available for the discussion of concrete examples. Which exact shape does the tail have? Roughly a straight line on experimentalists’ favourite double-logarithmic scale. But what do those graphs tell us? Where do the cut-offs come in? When does even the minimal cost of selling a digital item play a role? Will it be covered by selling a single copy in a year? in ten years? To me it seems that these seemingly tiny details will play a role if people want to make a profit out of the ‘long tail’ - just like the difference between x^-1 and x^-2 may seem irrelevant until you try to integrate.

While Anderson discusses the democratisation of production, this is mostly limited to what people call ‘content creation’ these days. With computers it has become feasible for people to mix their own music without massive investment. But once people want to create material things, the costs of production and distribution won’t be quite as convenient. It also seems safe to assume that the ‘long tail’ mainly benefits the people who trade and consume goods because they suddenly have a whole ‘long tail’ to choose or reap profits from. But what about the producers? They will benefit as well as more people can discover what they are doing but if they’re sufficiently ‘niche’ will that suffice to sustain them? A question which is neither asked nor answered in the book.

The most interesting point I took from the book is the importance of search and filter services. A wide range of options is only useful if you can find the things you are interested in there. Classification and statistics are needed to make that work. The Googles and amazons have shown amazing progress in those areas but whenever you are looking for something you quickly start thinking that they probably only managed to do the first few steps on that path and that many more improvements will be needed (and will be developed). The amazing thing is that today, in 2010, we take a lot of these services for granted, and we must do, because we’d be lost without them. It does work all right in many situations, but it also makes me feel uneasy because I have to give up any hope of controlling this system which I cannot possibly understand.

Bonus Material: When trying to figure out what the expression ‘Eurobeat’ means (apparently it and the long tail have to do something with House music) one can read a somewhat incomprehensible Wikipedia article or use Dave’s explanation which is comprehensible, short and even funny. Also amusing: The blurb on the book’s cover claiming that it is the most important business book since The Tipping Point. Either they’re lying in that blurb or you can safely stop wondering why the business world seems so clueless. Just sayin… • It may be interesting to read this Economist article observing that today’s media consumption may actually have stronger top hits and a longer tail but quite a dent in between.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Bookmark: 17-03-2005, KL598 CPT → AMS.

The book works a lot with two types of cognition which Norman distinguishes: The experiental type and the reflective type. Both are important, but in different situations and it may worth keeping that in mind when designing interactions or learning experiences for people. It then speaks about The Power of Representation, highlighting how the choice of presentation of a kind of information can drastically change how well and readily it can be understood by the recipient. A fun example of a phone-based airline information system is given to show how using ‘modern’ technologies can make simple tasks unnecessarily difficult.

Further chapters deal with sharing information and how this automatically happens in places like airplanes or ships simply by spreading the communication to everybody in non-specific manner or with organising a desk or a library with a focus on finding a useful organisation. Even the question how to apply that to things like the internet arises.

The penultimate chapter on Soft and Hard Technology points out that humans and machines find different things easy, doable acceptable and thus that it’s important to design machines with the human users in mind, rather than only following some engineering logic. And in the final chapter Technology is not Neutral Norman urges people to use technology appropriately as its affordances affect how people can use it. Making an effort to be helpful at that is suggested.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The book puts a big focus on ‘Information Appliances’, specific technical devices and puts them in contrast to a fully fledged computer. I agree with the basic point made: small specific devices can be better to use (but we all have seen many that miss even that opportunity!); Likewise I enjoy the general PC bashing:

What’s wrong with the PC? Everything. Start with the name. The personal computer is not personal nor is it used to do much computing. Mostly, it is used for writing, reading, an sending things to one another. Sometimes it is used for games, entertainment, or music. But most of the time it is using us. […] The personal computer isn’t very personal. It’s big and clumsy, sitting there on a desk, occupying space, requiring more and more time to maintain, requiring lots of help from one’s family, friends, and neighbors. Rather than being personal, friendly, and supportive, it is massive, impersonal, abrupt, and rude. [p. 69]

… which continues by ridiculing the concept of ‘booting’ and suggests that graphical user interfaces may be outdated - after all they were researched and invented for tasks of decades past with little in terms of progress happening since and the ‘market’ locking people into existing metaphors. (A very interesting point of which I would love to see a more detailed discussion) It then highlights that the main problem is the complexity of general purpose computers and goes on to point out that this is not an easy problem to solve, listing a few hailed and failed attempts to do so.

Mr Norman then goes on to discuss the big role infrastructure plays and how it can skew the marketplace in terms of what can be sold and what can’t. In the nicely titled chapter Being Analog the difference between humans and machines is discussed. Rigid vs. flexible, precise vs. imprecise, and so on. This culminates in saying that a big part of the frustration in human-computer-interaction comes from forcing people to behave in a way that computers can handle directly, rather than using all the power of the machines to actually support the user.

In the final chapters the book discusses Human-Centered Development and what kind of awareness and structures are needed in a company to make it work - rather than being crushed between engineering and marketing - as well as Disruptive Technologies where Norman highlights how people regularly fail to see the advantages of newer technologies because of their disruptiveness. And he puts Information Appliances as a possible next example for that.

While I can see the general point about Information Appliances and the joy of having a simple well-designed device for a single task, I am still sceptical whether Norman is right on that one. And I think the jury is still out on this. Looking at recent developments like the iPhone and its competitors suggests that some kind of middle-ground is popular right now: While the device is a fully fledged computer that can (theoretically) run arbitrary applications, the applications that do exist tend to be very simple and single minded.

Thus making the device a box containing a bunch of Information Appliances, trading the simplicity of one physical object per task for the simplicity of only having to carry a single device. Of course this ‘dumbed-down’ attitude in current applications - owing both to the disincentive to develop bigger stuff imposed by Apple and the crude finger gesture interface - finds critique as it ends up in clumsy usage scenarios (like the inconvenient switching between applications) at times. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Or what Mr Norman’s current take on the issue is.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Even though I think I can handle most design challenges with HTML and CSS^†, ^†… with the exception of implementing submenus that work in both horizontal and vertical menus which have (a) variable width, (b) are not floated, (c) don’t use elaborate JavaScript and (d) work in all common browsers - baffle me with your solution for that! and I can read the HTML and CSS specs, from time to time I wonder whether there isn’t a good book on the subject. Particularly one that actually addresses the biggest practical obstacle in web design, Internet Explorer compatibility, in a way that explains what’s going on. While I have grown an intuition that lets me anticipate IE FAIL and avoid it right away, I still fail to predict all of those cases or the odd situation where elements may be invisible and need another position:relative to be displayed reliably.

And whenever I get that urge I’ll look at random books. The most recent advice I can offer from doing that is that it’s a good idea to avoid the title Web Design Workshop by Robin Williams. While the book claims to be for people who know the basics, their measure for the basics is fairly low; Slightly above unassisted breathing. The graphics on their chapter title pages are awful and it’s not so easy to spot the correct and useful hints between the useless blabber and Photoshop love. Perhaps the fact that their first sections are ‘A visual glossary’, ‘Clip Art, Stock Images, and Groovy Fonts’ and ‘Spiff up Your Photographs’ are enough of a hint that the library wasted money here.

Perhaps the book wouldn’t have been too bad in the mid 1990s as it at least attempts to put a bit of focus on the structure of a web page as well. But seeing that it was published in 2002, ruins even that point and turns it into a waste of trees.

Whenever I see ‘historic’ stuff from the GDR, like when we did the Unterwelten tour, in the I wonder about the design they did there, what typefaces they used and so on. Somehow, the GDR (or possibly Eastern Bloc) design one saw always had this certain style to it which I find easy to recognise but hard to pin down formally. That style seems like their sense of design stopped at some stage between the 1950s and 1970s - which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

So you have ‘modern’ design with sans serif typefaces - the book actually (surprisingly?) showing quite a bit of Helvetica on labels from the late 1980s - as well as simple layouts and colour schemes. My guess being that the latter come from full colour printing simply not being feasible or affordable and the two colour prints that seem quite common being of the somewhat imprecise kind which makes them look a bit ‘off’.

That said, I quite like the simple graphic style resulting from this. Add to that the lack of competition and advertising as we know it and the labels you get seem quite sane compared to the crap you are exposed to when shopping here and now. They simply describe - in what reads like stereotypically ‘socialist’ language - the product at hand. They even print the price right there on the label (abbreviating ‘Mark’ in a no-nonsense fashion with a single letter ‘M’ rather than having the western ‘DM’) and there you are: frill-less mostly no-nonsense labelling. I’d surely appreciate that in the supermarket at times.

This is a photo-book, so it’s devoid of information beyond the photos shown. And a superficial amazon search didn’t show books with a treatment of design (or even typography!) in the GDR going beyond that level. The existing books seem to focus on ‘proper’ art instead which probably is a much more attractive subject to write a book about as it’s more pompous and political on first sight than mundane things like food-labels are.

Finally: The bottle on the book’s cover. It’s a strange thing, those wider bottle shapes seemed to be common in Eastern Bloc countries. I wonder whether that’s simply a coincidence of how designs developed or whether it has to do with the way bottles were produced and the limitations of the technologies used. Are there technical benefits to either design style?

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Recognising typefaces is a tricky thing. I’ve loved doing it for ages but since I stopped working with them regularly I find it increasingly hard to do. In addition to that I always lacked the ‘professional’ classification of typefaces. While I may recognise letters on paper, I’ll strugge finding the ‘correct’ name. Even more so as the classifications used in English language traditions differ slightly from the strange German one. And the terminology differs greatly. Recently I geeked out about typefaces with a French friend, just to learn that they have yet another set of terminology in French.

The Book Schriften erkennen focuses on the German classification, complete with names and numbers, gives descriptions, and presents examples. These are authoritative, yet short and readable, making it easy to understand the differences both visually and historically - which may aid remembering things. Between chapters they squeeze double pages on topics related to the font family just discussed. Say, about the different typefaces leading to today’s Garamonds, and examples of how those Garamonds differ or, similarly, the many Helvetica rip-offs.

While the book was created from a student’s diploma thesis back in the 1980s, it has been updated to include more current typefaces as well. Where ‘current’ probably was some time in the late 1990s as more modern typefaces are missing (Possibly discussing Georgia which is extremely common on-screen these days might be interesting; mentioning Hoefler Text Text might be as well; as would be discussing Palatino Sans when the topic of typeface ‘clans’ is mentioned; finally, I guess, the ubiquitous Arial would be mentioned along with the Helvetica rip-offs.)

A pleasant read with surprising depth in both explanations and example images for the few dozen pages it consists of.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

In public discussions the proverbial ‘market’ is frequently equated with democracy. Whether because, in the opinion of some, capitalism is the same as democracy - an absurd statement in my opinion. Or, not quite as absurdly, because ‘the market’ has populist elements. It rewards the people doing popular things and it crushes those who don’t. In a certain way that’s true without doubt. And this is usually used as an argument to present ‘the market’ as the extension of democracy to everything.

Which is utter bollocks but sounds convincing and clever, so people go for it. And, even better, they’ll ridicule anybody who wants other things that aren’t immediately rewarded by business logic. You know, interesting television, usable software or a good meal.

While I don’t think I want to disagree with the books points, I still found it a bit of a painful read (as in: I started it a year ago but only finished it off now) because it’s 400 pages long and simply doesn’t contain that much content. It reiterates points over and over, it quotes loads of people I don’t know and I don’t see how that strengthens its point. A hundred page explanation of the main ideas, arguments and counterarguments with a few pointers would have been more enjoyable.

The author also seems to go a strange way of collecting loads of absurd statements and implicitly mocking of the people (businesses, conservatives, media, …) making them, but seems to avoid head-on confrontation. To me it seems that there is no point to mock people like O’Reilly or business ‘journalists’. It would suffice that they are pricks or idiots.

The most depressing thing to take from this, is that the system still works. If you get the profits or publicity people will not second guess you. And thus, Microsoft is great, as is Coca Cola, as is Daimler Benz. Those are the heros we have to worship because they make our world so much better. And even in the ‘cultural’ area, it’s all a beauty contest about who gets the most viewers in the end. And if the research shows that the best numbers come from dumbing things down even further, then so be it! And the ‘consumers’ will even be the ones to take the blame because they just got what they wanted, right? Arrgh, on this range of issues I could just go on and on and the business-jerks who gain most from it will also be the ones who seem to ‘win’ the ‘argument’ (heck I’m running out of places to put all those quotes) because people choose eat bad food, watch brain-diarrhea inducing television, ‘read’ gossip magazines or drive inefficient cars. Everything simple, everything wrong. [Almost sorry for the rant.]

Bookmark: 21-06-2000, Greyhound San Diego → San Francisco.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

But luckily the book isn’t entirely marketing focused, it also tries to address other problems capitalism needs to tackle. Say, the maximum size organisations can have before they start being uncontrollable (150 people), how Sesame street was researched, or why most conventional attempts to keep people from smoking are doomed.

It’s a well written and entertaining book. Yet I am not sure what to make of it. While many of the facts presented therein are interesting, will make good trivia, and seem to be backed up by actual research, I kept thinking that in many places the book focuses too much on storytelling and people associated with those facts. Which at times left me with the impression that it’s more about telling a fun story and possibly even about covering up some of the author’s ‘conclusions’ which usually don’t seem to be backed by data and in some places could be marked more clearly.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Bookmark: 09-09-2007, FR3634 STN → BRE.

P.S. I feel compelled to add that I start having a weakness for cheap American paperbacks. Small books whose covers are littered with promotional quotes; which are very light for their thickness because of the cheap paper they use. Uh, and they’re cheap. You don’t feel compelled to treat them well and are happy to carry them around without worrying.

These things really do give rather good usability. And they are also pretty rare in books you see today which tend to be very stiff and like to flip their pages around as soon as you stop holding them.

I did a quick test of a few of my cookbooks to check how well they do.

Bocuse

Paperback books are bound to fail (pun intended) in this respect. They are simply too flexible and their pages will move as soon as they aren’t fixated. However, ‘cheap and cheerful’ is an argument as well when buying and my edition of Paul Bocuse’s massive standard work was bought with that in mind.

It’s actually quite a good book, mind you, as it both contains a good narrative about how things should be done along with loads of non-exciting standard recipes all of which presume you have a really good market around and that you don’t mind using tons of butter. I’d also like to laud the book’s translators who seem to know what they’re doing and even ‘localised’ the book a little with notes about how the ingredients translate into German meat cuts or which of them you simply can’t expect to find around here. That attention is quite rare these days.

Binding-wise, however, the book predictably fails. Sometimes you can reach a ‘stable’ state of it by pressing it hard. But a little touch is enough to flip a few pages or even make the whole book close.

Naked Chef

Let’s move on to the hard covers. Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef cookbook is bound, but the binding is a bit too ‘stiff’ to let pages really lie down flatly. You easily end up having some of them stick up - and thus flip over.

Add snide remark about this being an English cookbook and made for the coffee table rather than the kitchen at your discretion.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Sushi

The lovely sushi book by Kimiko Barber and Kiroki Takemura which I got from my mum with all its pretty pictures and even a few useful hints in there which I can read up on when wanting to try something that Chiho didn’t teach me right away, is quite similar to the Naked Chef ones in style and behaviour. But there seems to be less tension in the more glossy pages and I find it remains on the right page a bit more easily.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Sushi

The lovely sushi book by Kimiko Barber and Kiroki Takemura which I got from my mum with all its pretty pictures and even a few useful hints in there which I can read up on when wanting to try something that Chiho didn’t teach me right away, is quite similar to the Naked Chef ones in style and behaviour. But there seems to be less tension in the more glossy pages and I find it remains on the right page a bit more easily.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Jewish

This very interesting book on Jewish food is a massive paperback. It’s impossible to use in the kitchen on its outer pages, but due to its sheer mass, it remains open rather well on the middle pages.

It’s more for reading than for cooking anyway and the interesting bottom line - apart from the sheer religious idiocy of refusing to eat lasagne - is that there are two main lines in Jewish cuisine, none of which I would have recognised as Jewish, if they hadn’t labelled it. One of them is the disgusting potato rich variant I’d consider German or Eastern European while the other one is what I’d consider mediterranean Arab and it sounds rather cool (and makes you wonder how this Jewish-Arab hate could survive for so long - Liebe geht durch den Magen and all).

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Chemical

Hervé This(-Benckhard) has been geeking out in the kitchen since the 1990s, well before all the ‘molecular’ cuisine became popular. And I really love his approach of not making everything foamy, bubbly and invariably expensive but rather aiming at educating people about what happens on a molecular level when heating, frying, salting, boiling. Once you actually have an idea what’s going on in your food, your chances of coming up with new idea (or, more profoundly, rescuing a failed experiment) rise a lot.

The books I have (Révélations gastronomiques, published by Belin and the translated Rätsel der Kochkunst with mostly text amusingly published by Springer) are quite good at explaining and perhaps they won’t see too much use in the kitchen, still they do reasonably well with a few problems at the very beginning and end of the book.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Handbuch Kochen

This book is not a traditional cookbook but rather a collection of simple processes. Need to know how you skin a peach, fillet a fish or make pasta? You’ll find simple steps for that - illustrated with step-by-step photos - in there. This book won’t give you new culinary ideas but it tells you how to do things.

And it has a rather good binding as well. Even to the pages at the front and back it opens well and it won’t flip over to the next page once you’ve given it a light press. As the book looks rather mainstream, I was quite surprised by how well it handles.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

So schmeckt’s besser

Finally: So schmeckt’s besser which made me think about this issue to begin with. It wins the competition hands down. Both due to its binding and due to its very wide pages it never flips to the wrong page and lies on the table in a nice and flat manner.

Covers

Going through this also made me think about covers. And I am tempted to think that it’s just a stupid idea to have a protective jacket on a cookbook. There may be dirt in the kitchen and it will likely manage to get beneath the cover. If you then have a cloth bound book, things will be messy with a potential of ending up disgusting.

It may be more reasonable for a cookbook to have a shiny swipeable cover that cannot soak up things. Interestingly, the books that have a useful binding come with such a cover. And So schmeckt’s besser even is structured in an interesting way. Now I wonder how much of this happens by coincidence and how much happens by design.

The very wide format is odd at first, but it’s actually a very clever thing for two reasons: Firstly, you frequently don’t have a lot of space on your work surface while cooking. This makes it difficult to put the cookbook on there - particularly if you are using a large chopping board and need to handle things like large dishes as well. However, you can always fit a book like this at the back of your work surface behind all the stuff you are using for work. If your eyesight is in reasonably good shape you may even be able to read it there…

Secondly, despite being a hardcover, the book’s binding is nice and flexible which means the book opens flatly on the table with no danger of the pages accidentally flipping over. That certainly improves the usability of the book, and I imagine that the very wide pages also help achieving this.

I quite like the book’s design as well. It is all of interesting, clean and useful. Just as it should be. With the pages being split horizontally into two columns, the narrow outer one of which contains the list of ingredients and names of the dishes while the wide inner one includes the short instructions. Simple lines are used as separators and Univers and Garamond are used as typefaces (the Garamond with the IMO ugly italics, though). All very reasonable, functional and simple. Hooray for German design in 1967.

Interestingly the book was published by Siemens, Germany’s favourite corporation for making everything from high-speed trains, to telephones with the shittest (I guess that’s a word these days) user interfaces, to nuclear power plants, to household machines. In fact, it seems that the purpose of this cookbook was to make housewives comfortable with the wonders that are electric stoves, blenders and other utilities. Hence you’ll quite frequently see Siemens’ (and occasionally other companies’) equipment in the background of the photos in there. But it’s still a reasonably useful cookbook - unlike the stuff you’d get these days. (However - as my mum informed me - the book’s index is a piece of crap [my words].)

Being a few decades old, the book also carries the style and thinking of that age. The photos have that yellowish 1970s look and - while doubtlessly being specifically arranged - do not have the shine and lifelessness of today’s food photography. There is grease, there are non-white dishes, there are backgrounds to be seen.

But what’s best are the chapter names which not only display the sexism of the age by describing kitchen tools as Das Handwerkszeug der Hausfrau - the housewife’s tools, by suggesting snacks for a Herrenabend without a female equivalent or by providing a chapter Gerichte für Junggesellen - dishes for bachelors. Oh my, how times have changed! The lazy bachelors all grow fat on frozen pizza these days, and this paragraph won’t be able to fit a full elaboration of

Example recipes: Träubletorte, Biskuitrolle.