It's been the exploitation of
the Long Tail that has made Amazon.com so prosperous. That is, they stock or otherwise sell a very large number of very low volume books that
brick and mortar bookstores, even big ones, just can't afford to give any shelf space and storage space to.
So what's the implication of ebook sales to the shelf space issue of the long tail? It takes the same amount of shelf space and storage space to store one copy of a thousand-per-day seller as it does for a one-per-year seller in the digital world.
If I start up a new web site--Ken's Book Store--selling ebooks online, it would have to invest some money to get the website up and get contracts with publishers. But would I have to get a contract per book? Or a blanket contract per publisher? I don't know, but I would guess it's the latter. So with just a few contracts my warehouse is full. Suddenly I've got more books for sale than the average mega-bookstore.
I only started giving any thought at all to ebooks a few months ago. But boy, oh boy, this seems to be a game changer. No wonder Amazon's trying to rope everybody in to exclusive relationships via their Kindle.