Books also had an advantage over something like CDs because, at that time, there were only two major book distributors that every bookseller in the country worked with, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. This compared favorably to the several major and hundreds of minor record labels in the world. And as Stone also points out, books have what we would now refer to as a strong long tail: there were three million different titles of books in print worldwide, as opposed to only 300,000 different titles on CD.2 No single store could shelve all those titles. But an online store could. As Bezos himself
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