Books, Short Tails and Magazines

In a previous life, long ago and several evil empires away, I edited a two-volume book on the U.S. and Soviet economies. Never a best seller, it’s no longer even available, alas, so says Amazon. My subsequent proposal for a book on business conditions in the post-Communist world met with this objection from a no-nonsense publisher: “Businessmen don’t read books; they read magazines. Write three articles—that’s equal to a book.” That remark that led me down this winding road into periodical journalism. In particular (after a brief venture into business school that introduced me to the cable industry) it led me to this magazine, nearly seven years ago. Perhaps a more common trajectory is to go the other way, from magazines to books. Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine Jim Anderson, for instance, wrote a now famous article in the October 2004 issue of Wired titled “The Long Tail” that morphed into full-blown (and best-selling) book released this summer. Articles in this journal may have no similar destiny, but if there’s a second edition to Anderson’s book, this month’s contribution from Conrad Clemson and Glen Hardin on Start Over deserves at least a footnote. A key takeaway is that at any given moment, as opposed to over a longer period of time, that long tail gets rather short. In the book yet to be written on cable’s move into the business services arena, Chris Busch’s illuminating discussion of advanced provisioning would be a pivotal chapter, the moment when the protagonist realized he needed to grow up and get serious. Likewise, if a retrospective on the “Life and Times of the CMTS” ever gets going, John Treece and Michael Patrick might want to contribute the strategically nuanced article they wrote for us this month. As for our Top Tier article, that goes in the Big Book. Congrats to those associated with these honored systems, your names have been duly entered. Jonathan Tombes Editor [email protected]