I think history will eventually say, this was an interesting book for the fact that it was probably one of the most damaging ever to be applied to the digital economy. You are better off reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by NNT, Steven Strogatz Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life and Benoit Mandelbrot's The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence for a better idea of how bad power laws can be in economics. The book is very correct in that this is how the market works, it is incorrect in letting you think that you will get rich from it. You might get lucky. You might lose your shirt. You might run around in the end of the Long Tail like a rat in a maze.

If you want a taste of history, then read the last book of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, for his poetic retelling of the plague of Athens. For Epicurus' Swerve in Lucretius is exactly this phenomenon. Sadly, it is also Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. It doesn't lead to good markets, not without good money management, and right now, this especially does not exist in the USA with Bernanke at the helm.

If you want a taste of physics research, then check out the UPenn research on Brownian motion, where the scaling is asymmetrical. The good news about this is that Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves is probably right about free will though. But too bad for Chris.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article...

And I view this book as a plague now. I once liked it, but after seeing it used in practice everywhere, I see how bad it really is.

Seeing this book applied to currency markets is an even bigger disaster, and that's my experience with it in virtual worlds. No wonder Chris Anderson doesn't like Second Life anymore. ( )

Read chapter 1: it contains the entire book and it's only 6 pages long. The rest of the book is painful rehashing of the idea contained in Ch. 1. ( )

In a nutshell: the digital economy has made possible to take advantage of niche products in a unprecedented way. Products that don't sell enough don't make it to the stores because stores have limited shelf space. In the Web however, products don't need shelfs. Combine this with low delivery costs and the way to sell only a few of an imense variety opens up. ( )

A great book, rich with new ideas and examples. This is one of the few business books worth reading. ( )

Chris Anderson does a nice job of introducing some key concepts that are redefining business in the Internet era. As he says "The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes". In this world the ability of the Internet to give customers access to a vast (and rapidly growing) array of choices is changing not just how they buy but what they buy. The book has some solid research on how companies, both pure Internet retailers and mixed offline/online retailers are adapting to this world. The book discusses everything from Sturgeon's Law ("ninety percent of everything is crud") to the "98 percent rule" (98% of anything sold online will have at least occasional sales even if the online catalog is 40 times the offline one).
The book covers how hits have dominated in the past century and how niches will dominate in this one. It also gives some general suggestions as to what you can do about it although it does somewhat leave you hanging in terms of specific advice for how to do marketing, build information systems etc in this brave new world.
Thought provoking and compelling. ( )