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We're still in the mode where the publishing industry is fighting the changes brought by e-books, but I remain hopeful that the long tail will eventually catch on. There's just too many economic incentives.
I often use the example of video games. Valve's Steam service was the first to really open up the model of the hugely discounted backlist, but other sites now like Good Old Games have picked it up as well. Steam has shown statistically that you can make good money on older products where demand is normally miniscule. For example, you might have a game that's 5-10 years old that is getting hardly any sales, but you offer it for sale for $2-5, and suddenly it becomes an impulse buy. People who bought it new on a CD (or 3.5" disks, for the really old stuff) are going to buy it again just for the convenience value of having it on the service, able to download it to any computer that has the Steam client installed. I have bought dozens of games that I never would have bought if they hadn't shown up at a sale marked down 75%-90% from their original price. Valve has published sales figures that show that some of these games have had their sales figures increase by several thousand percent during these sales.
I bet that if Amazon could open up a cloud-based service where you could add older classic titles to your virtual bookshelf for a buck or less, they would make a mint. Heck, I'd probably re-buy my entire library of old sci-fi and fantasy books from the 80s and 90s if I could get each one for a buck or two. The publishers are standing in the way, for now.
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