Capiche the Niche?

Another posting at LexBlog that caught my eye (this one I know I linked to from Legal Underground!), titled, “Niche Legal Bloggers Could Threaten Legal Publishers.” I don’t think bloggers are a real $$ threat yet, at least not in the near future, but the decisions made by legal publishers do tend to baffle and boggle the mind. In my law library right now, we’re cleaning up a list of the looseleafs and treatises we’ve cancelled in the past 5 years or so. We’re a small library mind you, but the list is astonishingly long. There are lots of reasons for this. The driving one for a lot of law libraries is price inflation, but there are certainly other reasons. Note that not all of these titles, in fact few of them, are available online. There’s no long tail publishing decision-making going on here – at least I don’t think so. Or is the tail invisible, curled, or perhaps a double-helix? Surely lawyers are exchanging information as much as they used to, aren’t they? So … maybe the blawgers are filling some of that gap the books have left behind? It’s a big stretch, but, there are some awful good blawgs out there. Still, I’m not quite ready to say, capisco.