Book Sale? Heck, We're Giving Them Away!

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson sat down with Jeff Bezos as part of a 92Y event a few months back, grilling the Amazon.com founder about various developments at the store:

"If you went into a physical bookstore, and all the books were shrink-wrapped shut, would you sell more that way? Probably not. But for the first eight years, that's what Amazon.com was. Now there are hundreds of thousands of books [that can be full-text searched]. Sales of those books are up 9 percent relative to others. We wondered about things like cookbooks and reference titles--would people just take the snippet they need and not buy the book? In fact, by letting people search inside, sales of these types of books have gone up more than average."

Anderson's got his own theories about what drives Amazon sales, which he explored in a Wired article called "The Long Tail," basically arguing that "people are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture)." Since writing that feature, he's been blogging and laying the groundwork for a book on the subject.