A few weeks back, Joe Perez wrote about the inspiration we draw from the leadership concepts introduced in Jim Collins’s best-selling book Good to Great and how that title has become required reading for our team members.  But that’s certainly not the only book we’re inspired by at Demand Media – far from it.  Visitors to our Santa Monica office know that we maintain a “lending library” stocked with copies of the many books that have moved and motivated us.

Not surprisingly, those of us working on the content side of our business are especially drawn to the written word and its power to communicate complex ideas and fuel our own imaginations.  Here’s a look at a few of the big thinkers whose books have helped us challenge all assumptions about how content is created, distributed and monetized:

• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, by Chris Anderson 

“The Long Tail” was an essential component of our business plan when we formed the company 3.5 years ago. We perceived a huge opportunity: if Google could help people find the Long Tail, we could help fill it with high-quality content that is relevant to their query.  Interestingly, the rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter has helped to expand the value of content created for The Long Tail – as fragmented audiences can now find and share content relevant to their interests and passions.

• What Would Google Do?, by Jeff Jarvis

Jarvis’s book convinced us to view Google as a powerful platform, specifically one that enables other companies/individuals to build value and succeed.  We saw the power in that, and decided to build such a platform ourselves.  The result was Demand Studios, a content creation platform that is empowering thousands of creators to grow and prosper in pursuit of their passions: writing, filmmaking, editing, etc.  Likewise, as the largest content provider to YouTube, we leverage the Google platform to build value and succeed.  We see this as the future of media – separate but interrelated platforms all helping each other succeed.

• Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe

Where specific production tasks were once reserved for a few highly specialized workers, crowdsourcing opens those tasks to the wider community, and leverages their aggregate skills to accomplish even greater goals through mass collaboration.  As Howe notes, the best person to perform a task is the one who loves doing it the most, and the best person to evaluate that performance is a peer who will improve the final product out of love for the process.  We put this into practice every day by enabling our community of writers and filmmakers to perfect their craft with the help of their peers – a fellow community of proofers, editors and fact-checkers who pitch in to provide the finishing touches.  And to ensure we attract talented creators, we vet/qualify every person before they’re accepted into the Demand Studios community – and then pay them twice per week.

• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky

Shirky writes about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organization structures.  Historically, as businesses have grown larger, they’ve been forced to devote a higher and higher percentage of their resources to management.  We realized that if we could harness the creative power of crowdsourcing with powerful tools like our Creator Workbench, we could conserve more of our resources for growth, and pass that value on to our partners, customers and creators.  Today, we have 500 full-time employees at Demand Media, but another 7,000 more who collaborate with us every day from wherever they choose.

The business of media is changing.  A thriving industry that once created value for publishers and advertisers using traditional, mass-market methods has been turned upside down by search and social technologies.  Here at Demand Media, we may be revolutionizing the way content is created, consumed and experienced online, but we'll always owe a great debt of gratitude to that most traditional form of media, the book.