The Long Tail of Books

1. Online retail2. Used books3. POD4. Someday: ebooks

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

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”

Prediction:

Our children will never know the meaning of the phrase

“out of print”

Print on demand

Libraries

Three Long Tail drivers

1. Interlibrary loans2. Online databases3. Google (and other) Book Search

Interlibrary loan

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

The effect

Source: Tim O’Reilly

Opportunity

Source: Tim O’Reilly

How to drive this?

GreaseMonkey

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