Read Online The Long Tail by Chris Anderson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chris Anderson
Ads: Link
theaters or bowling alleys, these megastores carried as many as100,000 titles, an inventory five times that of the average local bookstore. It represented an enormous increase in availability and choice, launching an age of abundance for the book buyer.
Books were becoming cheaper and more plentiful—what more could anyone want?
Again, Bezos asked himself that very question:
I was sorting through these things. If you used the Web in 1994, with the primitive browsers and the technology that was available at the time, it was a pain. The browser was always crashing and things didn’t work right and your bandwidth was tiny, even if you had the best modem available at the time.
I concluded that given the technology at the time if you could do something any other way, that other way would be preferable to doing it on the Web. You didn’t want to do apparel on the Web, even though it was the best category, because apparel you could do very effectively through catalogs and through stores. This was my criteria: picking a category where you could substantially improve the customer experience along a dimension that could only be done on the Web.
It turns out that selection is a very important customer experience driver in the book category. It also turns out that you can’t have a big book catalog on paper; it’s totally impractical. There are more than 100,000 new books published every year, and even a superstore can’t carry them all. The biggest superstores have 175,000 titles and there are only about three that big. So that became the idea: let Amazon.com be the first place where you can easily find and buy a million different books.
What this quant had zeroed in on was an opportunity in what appeared to be a very mature book industry. Although there were lots of publishers, most distribution was handled by just two wholesalers, which had warehouses strategically placed around the country to serve any need.
That suggested a great opportunity for a virtual retailer.
Although 175,000 titles sounds like a lot, Bezos knew the inventory of even the largest superstores was just a tiny fraction of the books available. And being able not only to search for book titles but also to read reviews would clearly make it easier for customers to find what they really wanted.
At the time, there were at least 1.5 million English-language books in print—even the superstores carried just 10 percent of them. Today, the online database Books in Print lists upward of 6.1 million titles. Bezos also knew that more and more publisher catalogs were popping up online, offering academic books, trade books, self-published books, and more. There was no reason why Amazon couldn’t offer all of them.
What the Internet presented was a way to eliminate most of the physical barriers to unlimited selection. The bricks-and-mortar superstores had scale, but they still had to deal with the economics of shelves, walls, staff, locations, working hours, and weather. Because they were bigger and more efficient than the independent booksellers, superstores could offer more selection. However, even their business model hit the wall long before the supply of available titles did.
Today online shopping has passed catalog shopping and now accounts for about 5 percent of American retail spending. It’s still growing at a whopping 25 percent a year, and is well on track to fulfill Bezos’s original prediction that online retail would eventually reach around 15 percent of total retail, which would give it more than a tenth of the $12 trillion American economy.
One of the largest categories is the online sites of the bricks-and-mortar giants. Bn.com complements Barnes & Noble’s brand with a Web site that offers selection on a par with Amazon. Discount cards work equally in both channels, and you can get same-day delivery in Manhattan where B&N has several superstores. If a store doesn’t have a book in stock, the clerks are still able to satisfy a customer
Books were becoming cheaper and more plentiful—what more could anyone want?
Again, Bezos asked himself that very question:
I was sorting through these things. If you used the Web in 1994, with the primitive browsers and the technology that was available at the time, it was a pain. The browser was always crashing and things didn’t work right and your bandwidth was tiny, even if you had the best modem available at the time.
I concluded that given the technology at the time if you could do something any other way, that other way would be preferable to doing it on the Web. You didn’t want to do apparel on the Web, even though it was the best category, because apparel you could do very effectively through catalogs and through stores. This was my criteria: picking a category where you could substantially improve the customer experience along a dimension that could only be done on the Web.
It turns out that selection is a very important customer experience driver in the book category. It also turns out that you can’t have a big book catalog on paper; it’s totally impractical. There are more than 100,000 new books published every year, and even a superstore can’t carry them all. The biggest superstores have 175,000 titles and there are only about three that big. So that became the idea: let Amazon.com be the first place where you can easily find and buy a million different books.
What this quant had zeroed in on was an opportunity in what appeared to be a very mature book industry. Although there were lots of publishers, most distribution was handled by just two wholesalers, which had warehouses strategically placed around the country to serve any need.
That suggested a great opportunity for a virtual retailer.
Although 175,000 titles sounds like a lot, Bezos knew the inventory of even the largest superstores was just a tiny fraction of the books available. And being able not only to search for book titles but also to read reviews would clearly make it easier for customers to find what they really wanted.
At the time, there were at least 1.5 million English-language books in print—even the superstores carried just 10 percent of them. Today, the online database Books in Print lists upward of 6.1 million titles. Bezos also knew that more and more publisher catalogs were popping up online, offering academic books, trade books, self-published books, and more. There was no reason why Amazon couldn’t offer all of them.
What the Internet presented was a way to eliminate most of the physical barriers to unlimited selection. The bricks-and-mortar superstores had scale, but they still had to deal with the economics of shelves, walls, staff, locations, working hours, and weather. Because they were bigger and more efficient than the independent booksellers, superstores could offer more selection. However, even their business model hit the wall long before the supply of available titles did.
Today online shopping has passed catalog shopping and now accounts for about 5 percent of American retail spending. It’s still growing at a whopping 25 percent a year, and is well on track to fulfill Bezos’s original prediction that online retail would eventually reach around 15 percent of total retail, which would give it more than a tenth of the $12 trillion American economy.
One of the largest categories is the online sites of the bricks-and-mortar giants. Bn.com complements Barnes & Noble’s brand with a Web site that offers selection on a par with Amazon. Discount cards work equally in both channels, and you can get same-day delivery in Manhattan where B&N has several superstores. If a store doesn’t have a book in stock, the clerks are still able to satisfy a customer
Similar Books
