In 1994, Jeff Bezos left his position with Wall Street's D.E. Shaw & Co. to establish a new internet-based enterprise. Predicting the internet's future impact on commerce, Bezos aimed to launch an eCommerce platform that could cater to the fledging needs of a newly tech-enabled consumer base. Starting with a list of twenty products that his company could market online, Bezos and team narrowed down their target market to five segments; compact discs, computer hardware, computer software, videos, and books. After much deliberation, Amazon decided to offer books as its initial product offering due to the extremely large number of titles available. Amazon could use this wide selection as a strength, offering the "long tail" of lesser desired titles to niche buyers.
Flash forward ten years, and Amazon is now earning over $1b of total annual revenue, and driving the closure of book stores around the US. Seeking to lengthen its tail of availability even further, Amazon purchased Abebooks, an online retailer of rare and out-of-print books in 2008. What distinguishes Abebooks from other book retailers is its wide variety of book editions. So not only does the acquisition of Abebooks potentially lengthen Amazon's number of titles available, but it greatly increases the number of specific editions available for the books it already sells, and all offered through a purpose-built platform that still remains in operation today.
What can challenge Amazon's reign over the long tail of book sales? The answer comes from a platform that can channel even more obscure titles, editions, and formats - eBay. Long seen as a major rival to Amazon, eBay offers its sellers the ability to market just about any product online. People can sell autographed editions of comic books, extremely rare manuals from old video games, and just about any other type of printed language you can imagine. eBay offers essentially a limitless tail of books and similar products. Unfortunately for eBay, its long tail comes with the tradeoff of customer experience quality control. Relying on countless independent sellers, eBay customers are more likely to experience counterfeit prints, long shipping times, and other scams than Amazon customers. For now, it looks like Amazon's reign over book sales will continue for the foreseeable future.
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