The Long Tail [52 Books Quickie]

My next book on the list looks to be long, dense and dry, so I'll through up a review of what s, essentially, an overgrown pamphlet.

The Long Tail is a 30-page presentation available online that discusses the economies of a digital world; no significant limitations from distribution and retail channels. We can see it today with Amazon, eBay and iTunes.

The premise is that with low overhead, niche markets can account for up to half the sales. Walmart can carry about 39,000 top-selling CDs before the low sales on the bottom few make it counterproductive to stock more. Amazon has no retail store rent, so it can stock more. iTunes has no store at all, simply a web page and a server cluster, and can stock, conceivably, every song made and offer all of them to any prospective buyer.

As written in 2005, Amazon makes 22% of it's sales from books that retail stores see no profit on. These books need only sell once or twice a year for Amazon to make their warehouse costs back. For a digital only model (note the push to sell more ebooks with the Amazon Kindle reader) the numbers could approach 50%.

The two things needed to produce a long tail sales market (the name comes from the curve; hits are a giant spike, and obscure books are a long, shallow fallaway on the far end, a long tail to the graph) are the upfront hits - the pop movies, the stars - to get the customers into the store, then the recommendations for the obscurity and niche: "If you like Britany, you may like..." and "Customers who bought this also bought...". With these two factors a business model designed around serving the tiny niche markets - and serving a LOT of them - becomes functional and viable.