Fun read. It has a great perspective on the power of the web. ( )

If you have studied Economics before, then some of the book has known stuff like a Lotka curve. Many books are not best-sellers, however now we have a way of getting those books that before were difficult to find. All in all the best-sellers are everywhere as before, but your taste for a certain subject can now be rewarded in e-commerce, when you really get exactly that special book, DVD or any other item you were looking for for ages.
This book is especially recommended for those interested in Economics, society and the last changes caused by Internet. ( )

Long tails, tipping points, wisdom of the crowds, what next?

This reviewer read Anderson's book at least a year before writing it up, and wondered if she would be able to recall enough about it to do so. She thinks so, primarily because The Long Tail isn't actually about very much. It has a simple message, and a (oops) long trail of evidence with which to push it out.

Here it is: There is a lot of demand out there. Concentrated demand for popular stuff ("hits") and diffuse demand for eclectic, rare, specialised and minor-interest things ("misses"). Wouldn't it be nice if economies of scale were obviated, and transaction costs lowered to infinitessimally small, so that gains from trading could be realised all along the spectrum? Well hey presto--that happens now! Mostly (if not universally) in e-commerce and online shopping though. Amazon can "store" many times more books than any bricks-and-mortar shop, even printing one on demand in response to a purchase click. Rhapsody (or itunes) can catalogue millions of mp3 tunes in cyberspace and retrieve and deliver them to you no matter how minority your taste. Never-remotely-profitable physical production/transactions soar above the parapet of cost-effectiveness, and more people are happy, and everybody wins. More excitingly, the previously occluded misses--taken together--account for a larger chunk of potential sales volume than the hits do. So if you're selling into the long tail, this isn't some triviality about growing your revenue by a few percent. Maybe you can multiply it.

It is indeed a phenomenon worth celebrating, and Anderson certainly does. More than the message itself, the reader can't help but share the author's excitement at the infinitely extending savannah of choice at low cost. Thinking about it merely makes this reviewer lament the constraint that she remains limited to 24 hours per day of available time to consume all the goodies.

The Long Tail thus presents recent solutions to the problem that information costs something as, traditionally, do the physics of getting creative content from producers to consumers. This much has always been known, but it is worth fuelling optimism that progress happens. Participatory media is also given a good covering as lowering the costs of production and thus, potentially, making creative content producers of anyone. Shortcutting from there to the phenomenon of open-sourcing and we have an additional wellspring of people who happily provide something for nothing--regardless of its worth to anyone else--simply because they now can do so, and because it carries intrinsic value to themselves. Which is how this reviewer would modestly categorise the words that she writes in Library Thing--and most definitely if she's writing an entry for a book that has several dozen reviews already.

Of course, shorter tails remain. The net may be great but it doesn't lower everybody's transaction costs. That's beyond the scope of what is mostly a celebration of the power of online world. And it would perhaps be a bit harsh for this reviewer to make a stink about that. But she thinks that Anderson got his point across adequately in the original article of the same title that appeared in "Wired" issue 12.10 in 2004. He is entitled to go for the "hit" and she would score him a point for that. She ever so slightly misses the few hours spent reading the longer version, but not so much that she didn't want to allocate another 15 minutes to this here. ( )

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006) by Chris Anderson has been so discussed, cited, and praised the past few years that listening to the first few chapters I almost felt that I knew it all already. The basic gist is that businesses can profit from selling just a few units of lots and lots and lots of different products instead of just focusing on selling lots and lots and lots of units of a few "hit" products. On a graph, the traditional hit economy appears as a short head, while the niche economy appears as a long tail, thus the origins of the term. Anderson's original article on The Long Tail is still online at Wired (Issue 12.10 - October 2004) and is worth reading for a summary of the theory behind this book.

Anderson contends that the Hit Economy is actually unusual in economic history. Examples of the hit economy include Casey Casem's American Top 40 (which I listened to devotedly as child), television programing dominated by three networks, and blockbuster films. All were designed to appeal to a lowest common denominator to attract as many people as possible with the outlets for production controlled by a few. Prior to mass broadcasting culture was regional, and thus the things people bought as well. Today, internet communities are gathering around common interests in niches similar to the old regional cultures although the people using them are geographically disparate.

While Anderson credits the internet with providing the resources that allow the Long Tail to flourish, he also provides a history of the Long Tail dating back to Sear, Roebuck's Wish Book in 1897 and 1-800 numbers in the 1960's. The internet allowed the democritization of the tools of production and distribution and allowing enterpreneurs like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to find success. The economics of scarcity were replaced by the economics of abundance. It turns out that customers really like lots of choice contrary to the earlier conventional wisdom. The difference is that consumers need filters like recommendations and reviews.

I like the examples Anderson cites such as the history of house music, the study of jams, and the punk rock revolution. He makes a very compelling argument of the advantages of niche markets for the future of business. On the other hand, I wonder how permanent this change is. Anderson makes a point of the last big blockbuster pop album being an N*Sync record from 2001, their success in sales not repeated since. Yet this is a very short period of time. Despite the influence of the internet on exposing niche bands to communities who'll support them, whose to say that commercial forces won't co-opt these new tools of distribution and production to recreate the Hit Culture? I've read bloggers who are already complaining that blogs are no longer successful unless they have a staff of multiple writers with commercial support behind them. Another example was the success of the internet phenemom Lonely Island conquering Saturday Night Live with their "Lazy Sunday" skit. But is that the case? Could it not be said that the SNL's of the world will just keep swallowing up the Lonely Islands? ( )