This book is a few years old, but still relevant to the economics of the digital world. Well worth the read.

I'm rounding up here. It's makes great points about the long tail and how Internet retailing changes the market because it doesn't have to worry about scarcity and people will search beyond the blockbuster to buy and get things.

It's small at 200 pages but still fills a bit fluffed out. My biggest problem was how the author handled criticism. He either handwaved it away, thought it was still good, or simply said that better filters and post-filters were needed. For examples of successful music acts through the Internet he compared Bonnie McKee and My Chemical Romance, but he glossed over in one sentence that MCR was successful through their dogged touring schedule. Another example was how he handwaved the filter bubble wherein people will only read or listen to news/media/entertainment that fits their worldview. He says that it's not always a bad thing and that people are inclined to keep exploring. I just couldn't enjoy the dismissive and rosy-eyed view of how people use technology.

It also was profuse in its praise of Google and Amazon to the point that it felt reading a public bj lovefest; the author also shares some love by giving iTunes and Netflix handies. It's great for products but he only mentions a few example of how the long tail relates to services. It was a drag to read this book because it was too optimistic and praising and didn't seriously deal with downsides and criticism of the long tail.

I was very excited to read this book. It's a neat idea that I felt captures the 'silver lining' to online retail. I saw it as leveling the playing field between the big guys and the little guys.

In a nutshell, Anderson says that, thanks to the Internet, web-based businesses can hold their own against big box retailers. Since big box retailers have a limited amount of shelf space they can't carry everything. So they only carry a few things they can sell a lot of. Whereas online shops have no physical limits and which allows them to sell the "fast moving" items as well as the item that sells once every 2 years.

So the big boxes sell one item. But it's bought 1,000 times and the little guys sell 1,000 items but only make one sale per item.

This idea opens up all kinds options for web stores to carry niche items. I believe the world would be richer for it. But I have some reservations with Anderson's ideas and methodology.

This book started as a blog Anderson was keeping. Back in the beginning he interviewed some online businesses and formed his ideas and theories. Over the years, thousands of folks commented and helped out and a book was born. But what Anderson didn't do is go back to those businesses to see if his ideas panned out. He's just now written the book, but based on the old initial data. When reporters asked him if, in the years it took to write the book, he was able to see his ideas bloom at some of the companies he mentions, he said he hadn't looked. Why wouldn't he look?

If he had he'd see that a couple of the companies he bases his thoughts on had changed their strategies and made adjustments, because things weren't working out. So Anderson is writing from old assesments. No real harm in that. Unless you are a small business owner and think you just ran across a rock solid business plan and try to implement it yourself. So be careful.

So I think the basic idea here is solid. Or maybe I'm just hopeful. But I have serious problems with Anderson's case studies and evidence.

For more information look for an article that ran in the Wall Street Journal by Lee Gomes in the summer of 2006.

Ughh. This was disappointing and boring. Maybe a few years ago it was prescient, but now it just seems trite. I was able to salvage a few bullet points, but there has got to be better writing about internet fragmentation and marketing out there.

Recommended by John Sutherland in _How Literature Works_ as providing a solution for dealing with information overload. I was a little surprised to find myself reading a book about marketing but the combination of an interesting concept and light tone (plus many many hours of subway riding) kept me reading through to the last page. Said interesting concept got much less interesting as the book wore on and I found myself reading more to see where Anderson would finally slip up and say, 'Okay, I admit that there might not actually be a good way for publishers to make boatloads of money off of the internet'. Of course, said publishers make up a big chunk of Anderson's potential market for this book (not to mention the audience for _Wired_). Doctorow published a great review of this book in the Guardian and seems to do a solid job of targeting the major logical fallacy of (near) zero distribution costs, namely that when the cost to deliver a product per customer drops to (near) zero the whole model breaks down because who's going to pay something for nothing? Ebooks are great for authors, but not so much for publishers and retailers.
The tip for dealing with information overload that Sutherland gleaned from this book, such as I was able to understand it was that websites like GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon, etc can use the books you've already read to come up with recommendations based on what people similar to you have read, helping you explore 'the tail' (the 80 percent of literature that is not in the mainstream canon): "The 'long tail' approach did not seem to mean keeping within frontiers (like narcotic genre-followers) but mapping out whole new, but not dauntingly large, territories, as a kind of mosaic of freshly discovered discrimination...a gigantic smorgasbord in which the onus was on the skill, and idiosyncrasy, of the consumer, no two of whom would pile their plates identically." Sutherland seems to see Anderson's point of view as being a little overly optimistic, because he points out that picking out food at a buffet is a lot different from dealing with a 'deluge' of information. The implication that the average person can eat on their own but needs someone to pick their books for them is more than a little patronizing. Certainly, there's a lot of fluff that sells out there, but who's to say what's fluff to me is fluff to you?
I think you _are_ seeing more and more small press publishers, like Small Beer Press, Soft Skull, McSweeney's etc, who represent smaller and smaller niche markets which may or may not be based on genre but work by creating small, overlapping 'tribes' of readers, not unlike what has happened in music over the past decade. At the same time, there is more and more room now for random outliers to pick up a huge readership and blow everyone out of the water with a record-breaking Kickstarter fund raising drive. Pre-selling and teaching seems like the way of the future for authors, which may seem a little depressing, but I can't say it's any worse than being forced to sell yourself to a publisher just to get your name out there. The big guys are going to get a lot smaller before all this is over, though, which I can't say I think is all that much of a bad thing.

Some of the information and author's predictions are a bit dated, but the insights of each chapter were educational/thought-provoking. An enjoyable read.

When this was published it was a seminal book that defined the new business model for the internet. Since then, things have moved on, and some of the subjected predicted in the book never did come to pass.

In essence, the long Tail is the niche products and services that large stores and business cannot justify holding, when they only sell one or two a year. A small business could offer this prior to the internet coming along, but it was primarily mail order, or very specialised.

Along come the internet, and suddenly your customers could find you far easier than ever before, and you could justify stocking the item that sold one a month. With the advent of digital products, the sales capacity is infinite.

It is very well written, and i really enjoyed reading it.