"By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of
Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional
retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr.
Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles
produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive."

The article mentions that real economists are beginning to look at some hard data on Anderson's theory and trying to see if it actually pans out.

Sunday's NYT book review had an article by  Rachel Donadio on backlists, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/books/review/30donadio.html. She argues that

Indeed, so far, the winners in the long tail scenario aren?t
publishers but the online booksellers and the databases that aggregate their
titles, making books stranded on the dusty shelves of local used-book stores
readily available to buyers around the world. Online used-book sales rose 33
percent between 2003 and 2004, to $609 million, in a $2.2 billion used-book
market, according to the Book Industry Study Group. But publishers don?t profit
from used books. Even Anderson acknowledges this. Online retailers may have unlocked the fuller potential of
the used-book market, but ?that doesn?t benefit the authors or the publishers,
because the revenues don?t go to them,? he said in a recent telephone
interview. ?But it does benefit us as consumers.?

Meanwhile, in a great example of irony, Mr. Anderson's book, The Long Tail, sits at #10 on the NYTs nonfiction best seller list, enjoying all the perks that come from blockbuster publishing, bookstore placements, and extended media coverage. It makes me wonder if the best thing to do to help Chris Anderson out might be to not buy his book , but rather find and buy something way down the long tail list, say #100,000 or lower on Amazon. Surely he'd rather be correct in his economic analysis than rich off a blockbuster, right? Right?

But a real question, more pertinent to me, is where are libraries in all this?