Maybe not the end-all-be-all revelatory field guide to the new online economy its proponents gush over it to be, but still an easy to read and eye-opening primer to how the established systems of supply and demand have been radically changed by the internet and e-commerce. Anderson, a statistician by profession, "sees" data in ways most of us would only see rows of numbers, and the simplified graphs he provides bring a more concrete sense to the invisible world of economics and the shadowy one of marketing. And whether you know it or not, a lot of us are responsible for supporting this new kind of business, every time we buy something online or download a file. ( )

This book does a great job explaining what the long tail is, how to recognize it and some ways to apply it to your business. In short the long tail is the economy of abundance. It is a strong book from start to finish using many examples from different perspectives which gives you a much deeper understanding of the topic. ( )

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. ( )