I enjoyed this book and would have rated it higher, but for the fact that great parts of it are already outdated (it is about six years old.) I didn't have this version, which has an epilogue, so that would probably be a better one to seek out.

Not surprisingly, Anderson's discussion of the changes to the way business is run and content is distributed is spot-on. Only strange note, lots of discussion of MySpace - was that still around in 2005 when he was writing this?

It's a well-written book and the central idea is interesting: that the internet opens up the possibility of a lot more niche content being available. There's not a lot of insight beyond the central idea and there's a bit of repetition. Because of the subject matter the book is already quite out of date, despite being only a few years old. It's not a bad book, but I can't say I enjoyed it all that much either.

The concept of taking advantage of the long tail and non popular products is very interesting and I think it somehow relates to diversity of content distribution. However the writing is verbose and quite boring. The whole concept could have been presented in a shorter format, but I was really entertained by the idea.

*I will update my review and shelves later.*

The Long Tail is an interesting concept and, written in 2006, it perfectly anticipated the new forms of "Me-commerce" as drivem by Google, Amazon, eBay and Netflix.
However, it is somewhat uncanny that Chris Anderson first wrote about the principle of Long Tail in a magazine article: the book is simply too long. While it is arguably a solid theory to discuss commerce in the digital age, Long Tail as a book simply feels convoluted. Anderson clearly makes his point in the first couple of chapter, before going on and on with case studies of a handful of companies (Google, Amazon, eBay, Rhapsody and Netflix).
I would recommend The Long Tail to anyone interested in popular non-fiction, but there is not much information lost if the reader quits after 50 pages.

Stopped 100 pages before the end - it's well written but very much a book of it's time. The examples discussed are still valid but it's just not revelatory anymore.

I knew about the Long Tail Concept during my Marketing Master study and while reading this book, many aspects and the whole history (which is fascinating) of the Long Tail was explained and analysed. Even though the book was first published more than a decade ago, its content remains up-to-date, the examples too. Give it a go if you want to dig deeper into the concept, will be nice to read if you are into marketing or economy in general :) Few things the book touched on were forces that birthed the Long Tail (democratization in production, distribution, and how supply and demand find each other faster and easier), economy of scarcity vs. abundance, the paradox of choice (whether it is there or how it can be twisted) and how filters boost confidence when exploring down the Tail, and many more. You may disagree with some ideas or conclusions, but still the idea was presented 15 years ago, and still continued to apply, so, impressive.