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. ( )

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.

Francesca ( )

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? ( )

Mags used this in Canadian report at DC '09 to describe the next generation.

New consumer behavior...: In his book "The Long Tail," Chris Anderson insightfully presents the foundation of some new-age (mostly ecommerce) companies whose businesses are designed (intentionally or accidentally) to more deeply penetrate the consumer base. The expansion of product and content due to "unlimited shelf space" allows companies to service a greater number of consumers and harvest a larger portion of revenue from smaller and niche markets. This is Anderson's basic premise of The Long Tail. He paints very broad strokes at first, but his theories become extremely clear as he applies them to companies like eBay, iTunes and Google.

It's a good and important read for any businessman and it will definitely provoke your thoughts. How can my company better penetrate these niche markets? How can my company take advantage of digital distribution? How can my company integrate many of the cost saving advantages of the internet? How can I adapt my business and protect it from progressive consumerism (see entertainment industry).

Buy it, read it, learn it. These are principles that are going to be a bigger part of our lives as consumer behavior continues to march toward an online world.

Have fun,

David Tobias
Redondo Beach, CA

This is a straightforward book, explaining the notion of the long tail. The author is very effective at explaining his theory and supplying supporting examples. It is not too hard to believe since you can see the concept working around you all the time. Highly recommended. ( )

A very detailed explanation of what the long tail is and what it means to us and for the world. Full of interesting details. I read it with my husband, and it was great for stimulating conversation about a multitude of subjects (or you might call it getting off-track every other paragraph, but it was fun). ( )

It should come as no surprise that the editor of Wired magazine, that bible of all things technological, should be overly enamoured with the significance of the internet, but even so, only someone totally besotted with it, and apparently unaware of the world beyond it, could have written a book like The Long Tail, being as it is informed so deeply by such a utopian (or dystopian, depending on how you look at it) view.

Chris Anderson believes the internet has changed the fundamentals of economics, for all places, for all time. He's not the first to think this, of course: legions of young investment bankers, now deceased, made a similar mistake in those first few giddy months of the new millennium before the bubble burst. I can still remember the hubris; the outrageous scepticism which greeted ginger mumblings that things might be in la-la-land. Traditional business models were over. No longer did you need to have anything old fashioned like cashflow, or a business model which might actually render some profit. Well, those young bankers, and their clients, got burned, and even now their successors and survivors shudder at the prospect of making the same mistake. And while Chris Anderson hasn't made that particular mistake, he's made an analogous one: he's assumed that some undeniable developments in that (actually fairly slim) part of the economy that he knows about will necessarily revolutionise the whole caboodle.

For Anderson now, just as for those currently redundant young masters of the universe then, we're on the cusp of a brave new world.

And, just as they were not, he's not completely wrong, either: There *is* a phenomenon called the long tail (there always has been; the difference is that it's now sometimes economic to venture down it). And it's true, that opportunity it has been created by confluence of technological developments we're beginning to call the digital revolution. It's also true that the internet has radically changed, forever, some business sectors: those that deal in the digital revolution, and in particular "intellectual property", which has been most profoundly affected by it: publishing; the music and film industries, and the industries surrounding the web itself.

But it needs to be kept in perspective. For the rest of the economic world - and for those not dazzled by the e-froth, that's quite a lot of it - it's business as usual. The long tail won't matter a damn. As long as there's a physical good that needs to be manufactured, shipped and warehoused somewhere pending sale, the long tail - which is as there as it ever was, will be just as inaccessible.

The point is that the long tail wags only for those artefacts whose main value is intangible - which can be practically separated from the physical "thing" that contains them. For example: shorn of the intangible intellectual property inside it, the physical manifestation of a book, as an artefact, is (largely but not completely) valueless. A compact disc, as an artefact, is completely valueless. The digital revolution has allowed each of us, as never before, to quickly separate the valuable bit from the physical bit. Being a string of ones and zeroes, and thanks to Moore's Law, the cost of replicating the valuable bit of intellectual property is nil. Once consumers can accept the valuable bit without its "thing" the supply/demand curve looks very different, since the supply curve starts at an enormous amount, for one unit, then immediately drops to a micron above zero for the second, and flatlines there until infinity. The only limiter is demand. And, though Anderson doesn't think so, demand isn't unlimited. You can only listen to so many CDs, and read so many books.

But for trucks, and bricks, and oil, and commodities most of the long tail effect will be muted at best, and unobservable for the most part. Sure: businesses will be able to minimise warehousing costs off the high street, on a more dispersed basis, but it won't do much other than save some marginal costs. Someone still needs to store your oil. Oil isn't a collection of ones and twos. Neither are bricks, nor SUVs, nor - well, most things in the economy. But, this doesn't seem to faze Anderson, who rounds off by saying, apparently without irony, that when the technology of "solid state printers" (which render three dimensional objects in polymer from computer instructions) develops, no longer will be need to warehouse much at all. I guess we'll just teleport things to our customers. Good Grief.

Anderson makes some enticing comments about the inherent shortcomings of intellectual property law given the digital revolution, but then doesn't really follow them to their logical conclusion. It could have been a nice, and ground-breaking, book had he done this, but the opportunity was lost, and this book sits a fairway down the tail of decent Web 2.0/new technology business books floating around at the moment.

Curate's egg. ( )

Anderson talks about how there is a new economic model emerging for media. As the means of distribution increase and the cost of distribution decreases the ability to sell more of the less popular items has opened up a new market. Companies can now focus on selling to multitudes of niches instead of just a few hit items to a broad audience. While there are sections that feel repetitive, The Long Tail is still an excellent read. ( )

Maybe if I had read it in 2006, or if I weren't so familiar with all the stories and examples he talks about it would have been better. As it is, I had read the article the book was based on, and was familiar with nearly all the companies and products, so the book didn't add anything useful. ( )

An excellent book on how the internet makes it possible for businesses to make money selling small quantities of a large number of items. This is especially true of digital products (iTunes, NetFlix, audiobooksellers), but applies also to products that can be ordered at short notice (Amazon), products that can be PRODUCED at short notice (Print-on-Demand) and products that are being sold in quantities as little as ONE (eBay).

One of the most compelling arguments Anderson uses is that on any given day, Amazon sells more books that didn't sell yesterday than those that DID sell yesterday. In other words the cumulative sales of obscure items and old items, is greater than the sales of the small number of current best-sellers. The same is also true on iTunes. And of course when the product is digital to begin with, one can store a single copy at negligible cost (electrons on a hard disk) and sell as many as the market wants to buy, delivering them down the wire.

This of course has remarkable implications for business and creates ancillary opportunities for content creators (writers, musicians) and aggregators (review sites such as this and eTail sites).

The question is, how will entrepreneur's exploit these new opportunities. To find out, I tried an experiment and Googled "cheap", "downloadable" and "audiobooks" as separate words and was AMAZED at what came out ON TOP. ( )

Written by Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired magazine, The (Longer) Long Tail explores the Internet marketplace and how the importance of the "hits" - blockbuster, one size fits all - are diminished, to the benefit of the unique seller and individual buyer.

It is a fascinating read that stimulates more questions than it answers.

Anderson makes concrete suggestions on how to learn and change, if necessary, what the average consumer will discover about your company. Even suggesting a starter curriculum for social media coaching. For example, "How to get Digged?"

One chapter, The Long Tail Of Marketing, How To Sell Where "Selling" Doesn't Work, is worth the price of the book. ( )

I'm reading this for a class. Usually I don't add these sorts of books to my goodreads, but I like it. :) ( )

A book that describes why the internet is where one can find just about anything. It explains that the days aof the brick and mortar store is not going to be obsolete but why it limited. Why iTunes and other music on line sites, for just one example, are able to thrive while many records stores are closing. It is an interesting look at business in the future. ( )

Wired editor Anderson declares the death of "common culture"—and insists that it's for the best. Why don't we all watch the same TV shows, like we used to? Because not long ago, "we had fewer alternatives to compete for our screen attention," he writes.

Very interesting discussion of the economics of infinite supply. ( )

Great book. Anderson illustrates a new theory very well and expands and supports it throughout the book. Does NOT suffer from the "Non-Fiction Fade" like so many pop science / pop economics books do (the tendency to start with a strong and interesting premise and then devolve into weaker arguments and logical stretches in an apparent effort to fill a book with a journal article's worth of material), although he first described the concept in a "Wired" article. As with any description of a new concept, there are multiple examples that may seem repetitious but really serve to illustrate from multiple perspectives. Since the book is only about 225 pages long, I didn't reach that "milking it" or "beating a dead horse" feeling at all with this book and I often do with these kinds of books.

Anderson not only describes a new economic model, but also analyzes it - breaking it down to the three components that make it work - the democratization of production capacity, the democratization of distribution capacity, and the linking technologies that bring them together with interested consumers. I think it's a must read for anyone interested in the way the digital economy is different and who thinks about how it is going to change culture and society. ( )

Good book, though it seems a tad long for what Anderson has to say. Basically he only has one point, and he hammers it home again and again. You can read this in a couple of hours. If you want something deep, then you might want to try something else. Anderson is right though. ( )