The economics of the Long Tail

I'm obsessed by finding new stuff. And I'm fascinated by all the websites, automated recommendations, and search algorithms that help me find these new songs, movies and books. I don't mean to get all Internet-giddy on you here, but we're not living in a world anymore where you're stuck with whatever Blockbuster (typical store inventory: 3,000 DVDs) or Barnes & Noble (typical store inventory: 130,000 books) serves up. Amazon has 2.3 million books. Netflix carries 50,000 titles.

Retail shelf space is expensive, so it only makes sense that they'd stock the most popular, mainstream titles. But what happens when the web makes it possible to stock everything? When the stuff that nobody found it worthwhile to sell in the past all the sudden becomes as lucrative as the mainstream stuff? Wonderful things. Wired editor Chris Anderson does a fantastic job looking at the economics of it in "The Long Tail."  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html