Chris Anderson’s paradigm-shifting (and believe me, I don’t use that term lightly) article, “The Long Tail” claimed that 57% of the books sold by Amazon were not available in stores.
Anderson arrived at that figure with the help of researchers at the MIT Sloan School who sort of reverse-engineered Amazon’s private sales figures based on publicly reported sales rank. The Sloan researchers did this the old fashioned way: by purchasing titles at various sales rank levels and watching how their purchases affected the titles’ sales ranks.
After further research and collaboration with Morris Rosenthal, a translator and publisher, Anderson is re-estimating amazon.com’s long tail to 20% - 36%, more in line with the sales figures reported by other online merchants:
“But the Long Tail still appears to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of Amazon’s book business, which is a significant fraction by any measure.”
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