Long Tail evidence from Safari and Google Book Search

Long Tail evidence from Safari and Google Book Search: "By tim Last fall, I came to the defense of Google against lawsuits by the Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers, arguing that Google Book Search would help readers to rediscover works that were no longer commercially available. I pointed out, in fact, that only about 4% of all titles ever published are still being commercially exploited. (Kevin Kelly wrote a long report on the current state of book scanning initiatives in yesterday's New York Times Magazine.) A recent study by Roger Magoulas and Ben Lorica of O'Reilly Research provided strong data to support the assertion that online access drives usage of content that is generally not available in print. We compared sales reported through Nielsen Bookscan for the fourth quarter of 2005 with access logs from both O'Reilly's Safari Books Online service and from Google Book Search. The result provides compelling support for Chris Anderson's 'long tail' theory. The methodology we used was to divide the titles in the Bookscan top 10,000 into deciles. We then plotted the number of Safari views for "