The Long Tail of used books

If, like me, you're fascinated by how people discover and buy obscure books on Amazon, you'll like a book being released today, "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More."

The Long Tail already has several good reviews on Amazon, including one written by me you'll see at the top. There are so many good parts in "The Long Tail," it was hard to review it in less than 1,000 words, as Amazon requires. So I'll use my unlimited space here to expand a bit ;-)

"The Long Tail" was written by Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine. It germinated with his 2004 magazine article, which grew into a blog, and now it's the hottest business book of the year. Boiled down to its essence, the Long Tail is the idea that niche products (the yellow portion of the curve above) is starting to become a big business, and might someday soon be a bigger business than the red part.

That yellow part of the tail is our bread & butter. Those are the niche and out-of-print books unavailable in the local Borders, so we're able to sell them for nice profits.

The other part, the red head of the tail, are the "hits" -- the blockbuster books like this one. The hits make big money initially, but since they're overprinted, after a couple years the price becomes 1 cent. (I'm not knocking this book, I'm simply pointing out that 600 sellers are tripping over themselves to give away a copy.)

Amazon was the first business to prove the Long Tail concept, thanks partly to you and me. When we began listing our out-of-print and obscure books for sale on Marketplace six years ago, used books gained critical mass. Now, most hard-to-find books can be found in a matter of seconds, by anyone in the world able to type the title into Amazon's search box.

Think for a moment of what this electronic marketplace replaced: a fragmented, unconnected bunch of brick-and-mortar used bookshops. To find a copy of this book 15 years ago, you might have spent six months driving from bookstore to bookstore or waiting for a copy to be listed in a collectors catalog. Now you can buy a copy in 2 minutes, and choose from 40-odd vendors waiting to take your order on Amazon.

Now, 25 percent of Amazon's book sales come from titles that can't be found in a Barnes & Noble superstore that stocks 125,000 books. And that's the concept of "The Long Tail": thanks partly to the Internet, the short end of the tail may soon become a bigger business than the "hits." Not only in the book business, but music, movies, snack foods, advertising -- practically everything.

I don't want to oversell "The Long Tail" -- if you're a part-time used bookseller, reading it probably won't help you become more profitable this year, or maybe even next year. But if you have a long-term interest in bookselling, I'd suggest you give it a look. (You can probably wait six months and get a used copy on Marketplace for $8.99.)

One of the ominous things (for used booksellers) discussed in "The Long Tail" is how publishers are learning to become much more efficient. One of their tools is "print-on-demand," which enables them to print a book instantly each time a customer orders one. Once print-on-demand is widely adopted, our out-of-print bookselling business will be hurt. That's because with print-on-demand, books won't ever have to go "out of print" anymore. Instead of taking up space on a bookshelf, those niche books can reside on a computer disk at Amazon or your local bookstore.

Once that day comes, we all will have become collectible book dealers, or we'll be out of business.

And if you think print-on-demand is a nightmare scenario for booksellers, there's lots more in "The Long Tail" to keep you up at night. Now that it's so easy for amateurs to write and produce a book (thanks to PCs), prices for all books will probably begin falling soon. And with lots of this content turning up for free on the Web, nonfiction sales will probably take the biggest hit the soonest, Anderson says.

"The Long Tail" isn't just about books, it examines markets for music, film and many other product markets. Most of the data in the book is about the music industry, and how rapidly it's gone to digital-downloading, leaving albums and CDs in the dust. You can see this playing out right now on Amazon Marketplace, where prices for used CDs are crashing.

Thank goodness most people still find value in books. Real books, the ones made out of paper.