This is one of those books that I was very much aware of (thanks to the original Wired article in this case), but never got around to reading. I felt that I should largely because I regularly tossed about the core terminology (that is, long tail or Zipfian distributions) when talking about trends in products, software, Internet culture, and so on.

Overall, I think the book does a great job of introducing its core concept, but then wanders near the end, I think because Anderson was trying to (somewhat ironically) make it appeal to a broad audience of geeks, marketers, economists, and others. I think it would have benefited from more long tail examples from other industries (he touches on food and fashion, for example, in just a few paragraphs at the very end of the book).

I think it was worth reading, and had some interesting trivia, but is already showing its age, in no small part to the paradigm shifts in mobile computing thanks to Apple. A lot of the example companies he used have been marginalized or even gone out of business. I would still recommend it for people who are interested in the topic, but I don't think it has broad appeal, and you have to keep in mind that a 4 year old book is practically ancient in Internet time. I hope he does an updated edition.