The term "long tail" is certainly catching on fast. There's the recent article in the Economist—Profiting from obscurity—and American Public Media's Marketplace Morning Report on radio—E-Commerce Buzzwords— both of which discuss the long tail as it applies to the economics of online commerce. Without repeating the details of the power-law distribution, in the words of the Economist article, the essence of the long tail is "...a shift from mass markets to niche markets, as electronic commerce aggregates and makes profitable what were previously unprofitable transactions." The Economist mentions the example of limited shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstores versus the unlimited shelf space of an online store such as Amazon.com, which enables Amazon to carry and sell books in the long tail—the ones that are way down in popularity, yet appeal to some buyers.
The mainstream book publishers have had to ignore the long tail because they have a limited capacity to print books. Of all the books that are written, the print publisher is constrained to select carefully and publish only the "most likely to sell" titles. Just like the brick-and-mortar bookstores, major print publisher have no choice but to ignore the long tail of niche books. This makes perfect sense for print publishing and there is nothing wrong with the approach, but could there be a way for mainstream book publishers to exploit the long tail as well?
One option for major publishers might be to augment their current product line of print titles with a new "electronic content" product line. The electronic content would be the lower-demand titles and the publisher can offer them through Amazon or its own web site as ebooks or as "print-on-demand (POD)" books (perhaps, in the future, Amazon will take care of the POD as well so all a publisher has to do is offer the electronic files to Amazon). A publisher can prime its ebook catalog from its print book portfolio. For example, as a print title from the mainstream product line drops below a certain monthly sales volume, the publisher could move that title to the ebook catalog, but keep it on the market virtually indefinitely. I think this could be the start of a strategy that enables mainstream publishers exploit the effects of the long tail.
Tags: ebooks epublishing trends long tail longtail
Hi Naba. e-books and POD are definitely the best ways (currently) for publishers to extend the tail, so to speak. I can tell you that I generally look to place a book into the POD program at Wiley when (1) the regular printing inventory runs low, (2) there's still a sign of some level of demand (even as low as single-digit units per month qualifies) and (3)the book meets the criteria for POD. Books with CDs are often unable to move into a POD program (an example of where item #3 comes into play). At this point, POD seems like a much more effective way of extending the tail when compared to e-books. I still have a lot of faith in the future of an e-book model, but it's just not a real money-maker right now.
Posted by: Joe Wikert | May 14, 2005 at 10:42 PM
Hi Joe, I didn't realize Wiley has a POD program. For books with CD/DVD that cover something like a Linux distribution that could be downloaded, perhaps we can offer the POD version without the CD/DVD, but with instructions on how to download the distribution (maybe the POD book can be discounted a bit to reflect this).
Posted by: Naba Barkakati | May 16, 2005 at 03:54 PM
Yeah, I need to look into the options for books with CDs in the POD program. I've just been told they can't be included up to now, but I haven't heard a reason why...your download option might be a viable solution, at least for some of the titles.
Posted by: Joe Wikert | May 16, 2005 at 10:37 PM