Evan Schnittman, the vice president of business development at Oxford University Press, comes back from the Frankfurt Book Fair with some thoughts on three aspects of the publishing industry he says will be affected by the embrace of the long tail, "the theory that the optimized search capabilities of the internet provide nearly endless access to otherwise obscure products and that the demand for these obscure products exceeds demand for bestsellers."

As the search engine wars make "discoverability" into a hot topic, Schnittman sees the looming competition between Google and Microsoft as good for publishing; "[it] breeds new opportunities and motivates both parties to play to our needs, not theirs." For print-on-demand, competition between Ingram's Lightning Source and Amazon's Booksurge offers similar benefits, likewise the struggle between LibreDigital and CoreSource in the online content repositories market. "Taken alone, these wars are very important and extremely interesting," Schnittman observes. "Taken together they are may very well change the face of our industry and offer us an amazing amount of leverage and flexibility in moving into the digital age with the greatest advantage—we have the content."