Nicholas Carr looks at a debate between Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) and Lee Gomes, who disputes some of his points. Carr comes down in the middle, which I think is reasonable:

But the 25% is not the whole story, either. To get a clear sense of the impact of the Net on the Long Tail, you'd need another statistic: Before the Internet came along, what percentage of total book sales lay outside the 100,000 titles stocked in a typical large bookstore? There have always been specialized bookstores, selling everything from religious and spiritual books to textbooks to foreign-language books to used and out-of-print books to poetry books (though their ranks have been pruned by Amazon and other online sellers). And you've always been able to go to a bookstore and order a book that it didn't carry on its shelves. Only by knowing how big the old Long Tail was can you understand how much larger it's grown with the Internet.

My guess - and it's only a guess - is that the Internet Long Tail is substantially larger than the pre-Internet Long Tail, but that, in its current form, it amounts to something less than a monumental change in the market. The important question, then, is this: Is the Long Tail going to get a lot bigger, or has most of the growth already happened?

That's an excellent question, and it would be nice to have good stats from Amazon. Anecdotally, I know that I've found books on Amazon, either by searching or by "people who bought X also bought Y". I've read books that I know I never would have found otherwise that way. That's anecdotal though, and says nothing about other people's habits. Like Carr, I suspect that the net has increased the size of the Long Tail - pre-net, you had to live in or near a large city to find specialty book stores, for instance. Still, I'd love to see actual data from Amazon and their competitors on this.

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