Monday, April 14, 2008

Long tails in publishing

Just read this fascinating NYTimes article about Philip Parker - An Insead Business School professor who has written over 200,000 books. Most of the books, if not all, were assembled algorithmically and generally his works are only printed on demand. Interesting business model. Unfortunately its unclear as to how much money he actually makes.

I couldn't help but look for one of his works on Amazon, where a search for his name immediately brings up one of his master pieces: "The 2007 Import and Export Market for Household Refrigerators in Czech Republic." Which only sells for $104!

The product description is hysterical:

"On the demand side, exporters and strategic planners focusing on household refrigerators in Czech Republic face a number of questions. Which countries are supplying household refrigerators to Czech Republic? How important is Czech Republic compared to others in terms of the entire global and regional market? How much do the imports of household refrigerators vary from one country of origin to another in Czech Republic? On the supply side, Czech Republic also exports household refrigerators. Which countries receive the most exports from Czech Republic? How are these exports concentrated across buyers? What is the value of these exports and which countries are the largest buyers? This report was created for strategic planners, international marketing executives and import/export managers who are concerned with the market for household refrigerators in Czech Republic. With the globalization of this market, managers can no longer be contented with a local view. Nor can managers be contented with out-of-date statistics which appear several years after the fact. I have developed a methodology, based on macroeconomic and trade models, to estimate the market for household refrigerators for those countries serving Czech Republic via exports, or supplying from Czech Republic via imports. It does so for the current year based on a variety of key historical indicators and econometric models. In what follows, Chapter 2 begins by summarizing where Czech Republic fits into the world market for imported and exported household refrigerators. The total level of imports and exports on a worldwide basis, and those for Czech Republic in particular, is estimated using a model which aggregates across over 150 key country markets and projects these to the current year. From there, each country represents a percent of the world market. This market is served from a number of competitive countries of origin. Based on both demand- and supply-side dynamics, market shares by country of origin are then calculated across each country market destination. These shares lead to a volume of import and export values for each country and are aggregated to regional and world totals. In doing so, we are able to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of both the value of each market and the share that Czech Republic is likely to receive this year. From these figures, rankings are calculated to allow managers to prioritize Czech Republic compared to other major country markets. In this way, all the figures provided in this report are forecasts that can be combined with internal information sources for strategic planning purposes."

And, of course, I just added The 2007 Import and Export Market for Household Refrigerators in Czech Republic to my Amazon wish list.

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