Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

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The Forgotten Consumer (Jacob Lewis, Figment)

Jacob Lewis is the co-founder and CEO of Figment, an online community for teens and young adults to create, discover, and share new reading and writing. Before starting Figment, Jacob was the Managing Editor of The New Yorker magazine, where he worked for more than 12 years, and Conde Nast Portfolio. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

The Inefficient Market

In the early 1990s, while in the port city of Brindisi, Italy, I came across some people on the street selling pirated versions of English-language books. The books were crudely bound and looked to be photocopied. But they were cheap and plentiful, and since I was getting on a long boat ride, I bought a couple.

On one hand, stolen content that benefits only the seller obviously isn’t good for the book industry. But in their way, those stalls in Brindisi were models of smart publishing. They had created an incredibly efficient market. These sellers knew exactly who would be walking by—American kids backpacking around Europe with little money to spend and even less room in their bags—and they tailored their selection specifically to those customers.

Finding any kind of efficiency in today’s publishing industry is difficult. Unlike the sellers in Brindisi, publishers (and most retailers) don’t know who’s going to walk by on any given day or what they might be interested in reading, let alone purchasing. There is very little information available for each product, including the forecasted ...