Internet and the ‘Long Tail versus superstar effect’ debate: evidence from the French book market

Abstract

From a comprehensive database of monthly sales of comic books and literature books in France over the period 2003 to 2007, we show that (i) bestsellers got smaller market shares online than offline, contrary to medium- and low-sellers; (ii) both online and offline sales shift from the head of the distribution to the tail with increasing magnitude over the period; and (iii) the Long Tail appears to be more than just a short-lived phenomenon caused by the specific preferences of early adopters of e-commerce. These three results suggest that online information and distribution tools, whose use increased over the period 2003 to 2007, do have an impact on book distribution and on consumers' purchase decisions.