Recommended by John Sutherland in _How Literature Works_ as providing a solution for dealing with information overload. I was a little surprised to find myself reading a book about marketing but the combination of an interesting concept and light tone (plus many many hours of subway riding) kept me reading through to the last page. Said interesting concept got much less interesting as the book wore on and I found myself reading more to see where Anderson would finally slip up and say, 'Okay, I admit that there might not actually be a good way for publishers to make boatloads of money off of the internet'. Of course, said publishers make up a big chunk of Anderson's potential market for this book (not to mention the audience for _Wired_). Doctorow published a great review of this book in the Guardian and seems to do a solid job of targeting the major logical fallacy of (near) zero distribution costs, namely that when the cost to deliver a product per customer drops to (near) zero the whole model breaks down because who's going to pay something for nothing? Ebooks are great for authors, but not so much for publishers and retailers.
The tip for dealing with information overload that Sutherland gleaned from this book, such as I was able to understand it was that websites like GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon, etc can use the books you've already read to come up with recommendations based on what people similar to you have read, helping you explore 'the tail' (the 80 percent of literature that is not in the mainstream canon): "The 'long tail' approach did not seem to mean keeping within frontiers (like narcotic genre-followers) but mapping out whole new, but not dauntingly large, territories, as a kind of mosaic of freshly discovered discrimination...a gigantic smorgasbord in which the onus was on the skill, and idiosyncrasy, of the consumer, no two of whom would pile their plates identically." Sutherland seems to see Anderson's point of view as being a little overly optimistic, because he points out that picking out food at a buffet is a lot different from dealing with a 'deluge' of information. The implication that the average person can eat on their own but needs someone to pick their books for them is more than a little patronizing. Certainly, there's a lot of fluff that sells out there, but who's to say what's fluff to me is fluff to you?
I think you _are_ seeing more and more small press publishers, like Small Beer Press, Soft Skull, McSweeney's etc, who represent smaller and smaller niche markets which may or may not be based on genre but work by creating small, overlapping 'tribes' of readers, not unlike what has happened in music over the past decade. At the same time, there is more and more room now for random outliers to pick up a huge readership and blow everyone out of the water with a record-breaking Kickstarter fund raising drive. Pre-selling and teaching seems like the way of the future for authors, which may seem a little depressing, but I can't say it's any worse than being forced to sell yourself to a publisher just to get your name out there. The big guys are going to get a lot smaller before all this is over, though, which I can't say I think is all that much of a bad thing.