Product Description

What happens when there is almost unlimited choice? When everything becomes available to everyone? And when the combined value of the millions of items that only sell in small quantities equals or even exceeds the value of a handful of best-sellers? In this ground-breaking book, Chris Anderson shows that the future of business does not lie in hits - the high-volume end of a traditional demand curve - but in what used to be regarded as misses - the endlessly long tail of that same curve. As our world is transformed by the Internet and the near infinite choice it offers consumers, so traditional business models are being overturned and new truths revealed about what consumers want and how they want to get it. Chris Anderson first explored the Long Tail in an article in Wired magazine that has become one of the most influential business essays of our time. Now, in this eagerly anticipated book, he takes a closer look at the new economics of the Internet age, showing where business is going and exploring the huge opportunities that exist: for new producers, new e-tailers, and new tastemakers.He demonstrates how long tail economics apply to industries ranging from the toy business to advertising to kitchen appliances. He sets down the rules for operating in a long tail economy. And he provides a glimpse of a future that's already here.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6468 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From the Publisher
The new economics of culture and commerce

From the Back Cover
With his brilliant theory of the Long Tail – a powerful new economic force in a world where the internet allows access to almost unlimited choice – Chris Anderson has identified an important truth about our economy and culture: that the future does not lie in hits – the high-volume end of a traditional demand curve – but in what used to be regarded as misses – the curve's endlessly long tail.

In this expanded and updated edition, published for the first time in paperback, he examines how niche interests, which make up the millions of misses, have come together in a global network, stimulating innovation on an unprecedented scale. The result, he argues, is a cultural richness in which enthusiasms previously dismissed as ‘minority’ thrive and everybody everywhere can find something to their taste.

‘A smart, timely and oddly inspiring book.’ - Time Out

'It’s the Big Idea of 2006.’ - GQ

‘The Long Tail is an eloquent exposition of a simple idea, but one that has huge ramifications for our media and culture if followed to its logical conclusions.’ - Guardian Media

'Each year produces a book that captures the Zeitgeist... This year Chris Anderson's The Long Tail has helped to reinterpret our world.' - The Times

‘…snappily argued and thought-provoking.’ - New Yorker

About the Author
Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, a position he took up in 2001. Since then he has led the magazine to five National Magazine Award nominations, winning the top prize for General Excellence in 2005, a year in which he was also named editor of the year by AdAge magazine. Previously, he was at the Economist, Nature, and Science magazines. He has worked as a researcher at Los Alamos and served as research assistant to the Chief Scientist of the Department of Transportation. He lives in Northern California with his wife and four children. He can be reached at www.thelongtail.com.

Customer Reviews

When Variety Costs Little More, People Enjoy Having More of It
When you want to eat ice cream outside your home, do you go to a store that offers only chocolate and vanilla . . . or do you go where there are many more choices? Most people will do the latter. That's the basic point of this book. If you're satisfied with knowing that point, you don't need to read the book. Instead, you could settle for Mr. Anderson's article in the October 2004 issue of Wired.

But if you are like the growing legions of people who enjoy knowing more about the quirks of micro-economics (such as those who were intrigued by The Tipping Point, Freakonomics and Fooled by Randomness), The Long Tail will provide much entertainment.

Let me explain what a long tail is. If you plot the popularity of various products (say, books on Amazon) with the most popular products at the left, the left part of the curve will be very vertical (the head) and there will be a long list of items to the right that will have relatively few sales (the tail). Mr. Anderson's point is that as it becomes economically viable to produce and distribute more low-volume products (such as print-on-demand books and e-books), there will be more items available to purchase at any outlet . . . and the length the tail to the right will grow. As more outlets can afford to make these items available, the thickness of the tail will also grow.

A physical store will only distribute a small percentage of the items, stopping where the offering no longer adds to its targeted rate of profits. An on-line store will have far more items (such as Amazon), appeal to more customers and sell lots of its volume in relatively unpopular items. The author estimates that 25% of Amazon's book sales volume, for instance, comes from outside the 100,000 top selling books.

Here's where Mr. Anderson begins to lose his way: He tries to describe the sociological implications. He sees, for example, a loss of common cultural items of the sort that talking about the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan once provided. He imagines a world in which everyone drifts off into various different niches and the size of the head becomes less vertical. While that may be true, it doesn't correctly forecast the amount of commonality in the culture. The sales of any given item over time may well be in both the head and the tail. Or an item could be a sleeper and always be in the tail, but if enough people buy it, the item will become part of the common culture. In addition, some elements of common culture don't appear in sales curves. I'm sure that yesterday's arrests in the alleged plot to bomb a number of airplanes have already become part of the common culture.

I won't go on to point out his other errors. I'm sure you'll notice them for yourself.

The other disappointment was that he doesn't do a very good job of describing strategy choices for product producers. It seems to me that the long tail is simply another argument in favor of intense individual product and service customization of the sort that Dell has been giving us for years in computers and related equipment.

My grade of 3 stars for the book is 5 stars for long-tail trivia and 1 star for sociological and producer analysis.

If you haven't read any of the following books, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics and Fooled by Randomness, I recommend that you read those long before you get around this one. They are much better books about micro-economic implications.

Great Book
I started reading The Long Tail straight after reading "Why The World Is Full of Useless Things" by Steve McKevitt which was published last year. These are two great books to read together offering a much broader analysis than they do on their own.

I think we've got it in ourselves to move into a more ethical way of being - and the potentially limitless choice of the internet might paradoxically bring that about, as per Long Tail, we stop being passive consumers of mass produced crap, we develop ever more niched niches for our little individual selves to consume and create from, power really does pass back to consumers (sort of) etc. I urge you to read both.

A 'Tipping Point' Type of Book
This book helped me realise how the web (an enabler for huge choice at low cost) could provide individuals with new markets and real opportunities. Inspirational.