New data on the Long Tail impact suggests rethinking history and ideas about the future of publishing

Topic: 

The Shatzkin Files

For most of my lifetime, the principal challenge a publisher faced to get a book noticed by a consumer and sold was to get it on the shelves in bookstores. Data was always scarce (I combed for it for years) but everything I ever saw reported confirmed that customers generally chose from what was made available through their retailers. Special orders — when a store ordered a particular book for a particular customer on demand, which meant the customer had to endure a gap between the visit when they ordered the book and one to pick it up — were a feature of the best stores and the subject of mechanisms (one called STOP in the 1970s and 1980s) that made it easier. But they constituted a very small percentage of any store’s sales, even when the wholesalers Ingram and Baker & Taylor made a vast number of books available to most stores within a day or two.

Full post here.
http://lisnews.org/new_data_on_the_long_tail_impact_suggests_rethinking_history_and_ideas_about_the_future_of_publishin
lisnews.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
17807
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:I4IRE7UYGO7J6FZOUNE3LJLHF5FFK2BJ
<urn:uuid:676e5945-f58b-46fc-81c8-766abb974069>
2015-04-28T11:07:37Z
104.27.171.130
sha1:QZ6BMXKUBLDA6M5ZBVIJBSLIO2JAACYA
<urn:uuid:3f3e2a78-0834-453b-9cbb-92773829f88c>
http://lisnews.org/new_data_on_the_long_tail_impact_suggests_rethinking_history_and_ideas_about_the_future_of_publishin
length
response
<urn:uuid:ea22247c-9d04-4ef4-813e-9f483b159196>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf