A recently published study by researchers from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas tempers the long-held idea that the rise of e-commerce would democratize book sales.
The paper — Only a “Longish” Tail — was published in the August 2025 issue of Production and Operations Management, a peer-reviewed journal tracked in the UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings™. The research team consists of Dr. Stanley Liebowitz, professor emeritus at the Jindal School; Dr. Alejandro Zentner, an associate professor in the Jindal School’s Finance and Managerial Economics Area; and Dr. Michael R. Ward from the University of Texas at Arlington.
While many believed that the advent of online shopping would shift consumer attention away from bestsellers and toward more obscure or niche titles — the so-called “long tail” of the market—the study finds that this transformation has been modest at best. Analyzing more than a decade’s worth of book sales data and the fallout from Borders’ 2011 bankruptcy, the authors conclude that although obscure titles now sell slightly more than before, most sales still come from a relatively small group of popular books. In other words: the long tail is more of a “longish” tail.
Liebowitz said that, given these findings, publishers should rethink their strategies regarding how much to invest in long-tail titles versus focusing more on top sellers and mid-tier books.
“If they were expecting a large democratization of sales, where slow sellers took a much larger share of sales than best-sellers, then they should rethink their strategy,” he said. “If they were planning to decrease advances to top authors relative to low-tier authors, that would have been a mistake. The long tail we find is practically de minimis and not consistent with the long tail ‘hypothesis’ which said the slow sellers would, in the aggregate, match or surpass the sales of bestselling books.”
Zentner said a major budget shift toward niche titles is unlikely to pay off in the book industry.
“Publishers might still keep some long-tail books for breadth and variety, but top and mid-tier titles remain the main revenue drivers,” he said.
The results of the study are based on the combined online and offline book market excluding ebooks, which arose in the mid-aughts but have consistently had a market share of less than 20%.
Zentner emphasized that even if there is no strong long tail when looking at aggregated sales across channels, it is possible that customers choose different books online versus offline.
“It’s also possible that online retailers have a somewhat longer tail than offline ones,” he said. “The study confirms that business models based on data are much less risky than building business models around popular hypotheses before they’ve been rigorously tested.”
“Business decisions in changing markets are risky,” Liebowitz said, pointing to the dot-com bubble and now what he sees as the artificial intelligence craze.
“Although the original long-tail papers appeared to have data supporting their hypothesis, the support was actually very thin and based on a collection of models that made assumptions about the underlying distribution of book sales,” he said. “There was a lot of talk about ‘power laws’ describing sales distributions a decade or two ago, and those claims turned out to be incorrect, as Alejandro and I show in a different recent publication.”
Liebowitz said it made sense for retailers to test the water about the long-tail hypothesis, but it would have been a dangerous mistake to go “whole hog” in the early days of the hypothesis.
“The retailers and publishers could have seen the results for themselves since our industry data is just based on their actual sales over time,” he said. “There were also early claims that the long-tail hypothesis was wrong, which did not get as much attention as the more exciting long-tail claims. That is a danger in the reporting on academic theories where the more exotic, the better.”
According to Liebowitz, the long tail theory was widely accepted even without strong empirical evidence at the time, because it seemed logical and there was supposed support for it from some leading academics.
“And it was an exotic man bites dog story, which gets attention,” he said. “And it was pushed in a best-selling book.”
The team’s research suggests recommendation systems may not drive sales as deeply into the long tail as had been assumed.
“Recommendation systems can still shape what customers buy,” Zentner said. “Even if overall variety doesn’t expand much, they might influence consumers to buy different titles than they would without recommendations.”
“The goal of these systems, from those setting them up, should be to maximize profit,” he said. “This effectively means maximizing long-term sales. There’s no reason to think these systems were set up to drive sales to the long tail. Their effect might be neutral on the distribution of sales.”
As for self-published authors who hope for their niche books to break through, Liebowitz said the internet can bypass the traditional book publishing gatekeepers.
“There are many instances of self-published book titles becoming successful,” he said. “It is also the case that many of these successful self-published authors later turn to traditional publishing for follow-on titles. But such behavior is not entirely new. Charles Dickens, after being very successful, tried self-publishing.”
Liebowitz suspects similar long-tail assumptions in other industries like music or streaming video are also likely exaggerated.
“If those entertainment industries have the same type of consumers, then we can make the same assumptions as with books,” he said. “But industries need to be examined one at a time to get beyond the ‘suspect’ stage. The music industry, for example, doesn’t sell many individual songs or albums anymore. But I suspect that the streams that replaced those sales are likely to be highly concentrated at the top in a similar manner to album sales from decades ago. Most prior studies have not had access to an entire industry and have had to rely on data from individual retailers or publishers, making their results difficult to generalize to the entire industry.”
Zentner added that each industry should be examined before assuming the size or importance of a long-tail shift.
“Some research in other sectors has found meaningful long-tail effects, so the pattern may vary depending on the market and on which part of it is being studied, like online sales versus physical store sales.”
Liebowitz said since there was some basic logic to the story, he would have expected greater movement to the long tail than the minimal movement the team found.
“But the full hypothesis, that the tail would become the primary locus of sales always seemed hard to believe given how concentrated mass market entertainment sales in multiple markets have tended to be for over a century,” he said.
