The Long Tail of Books

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The Long Tail of Books

• Online retail
• Used books
• POD
• Someday ebooks

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Online

• Around 15 of all book sales, growing 18
  annually
  
• Amazon (and Marketplace sellers) have about
  75-80 of the online market
  
• Demand shifting towards niches

Source Morris Rosenthal
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Used Books

• Fastest growing portion of the book market (up
  33 last year, now nearly 10 of all consumer
  book sales)
  
• Classic secondary market how will increasing
  liquidity affect the primary market?
  
• Expansion of virtual inventory

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Prediction

• Our children will never know the meaning of the
  phrase
  
• out of print

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Print on demand
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Libraries

• Three Long Tail drivers
• Interlibrary loans
• Online databases
• Google (and other) Book Search

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Interlibrary loan
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A few stats

• Loans account for just 1.7 of overall circ (4.7
  for academic libraries)
  
• Yet 60 of the aggregate collections of the
  Google 5) are held by just one library
  
• Just 10 of books account for 90 of circ
• The opportunity aggregate distributed supply and
  distributed demand

Source OCLC
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Online databases

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The effect
Source Tim OReilly
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Opportunity
Source Tim OReilly
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How to drive this?
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GreaseMonkey
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Via RSS (Bloglines)