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The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More Paperback – Illustrated, July 8 2008

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What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone?

"The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google.

However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know.

The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.

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288 pages
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English
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July 8 2008
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18 years and up
Dimensions

13.18 x 1.65 x 20.32 cm
ISBN-10

9781401309664
ISBN-13

978-1401309664
Lexile measure

1230L
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ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1401309666
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hachette Books; Revised edition (July 8 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781401309664
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1401309664
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 240 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.18 x 1.65 x 20.32 cm

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- #153 in Research Marketing
- #161 in Market Research (Books)
- #367 in International Economic Conditions (Books)

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Phil

Want to understand how to turn your overhead into profit?

Reviewed in Canada on August 6, 2015

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Helps you understand where the future of business is headed by using examples from the early 1900's to present day, and shows you theory's of how tomorrow will be shaped. Also, it's like you're talking to a friend. Such an easy and interesting read!

One person found this helpful

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Jan Suns

Fascinating subject matter.

Reviewed in Canada on May 21, 2015

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Amazing book, and fascinating for anyone to read, young or old. There are some sound business concepts in there. The Long Tail definitely points out some unexplored avenues in any area of media/products/services in today's world. A must read for business owners on the Internet.

Reviewed in Canada on July 10, 2017

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Great read!

Helpful

When Variety Costs Little More, People Enjoy Having More of It

Reviewed in Canada on August 11, 2006

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.

24 people found this helpful

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Robert Morris

Here is a road map to navigate your way through "a market of multitudes"

Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 2008

In the October 2004 issue of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson published an article in which he shared these observations: "(1) the tail of available variety is far longer than we realize; (2) it's now within reach economically; (3) all those niches, when aggregated, can make up a significant market - seemed indisputable, especially backed up with heretofore unseen data." That is even truer today than it was three years ago. The era that Anderson characterizes as "a market of multitudes" continues to grow in terms of both its nature and extent. In this book, Anderson takes his reader on a guided tour of this market as he explains what the probable impact the new market will have and what will be required to prosper in it.

According to Anderson, those who read the article saw the Long Tail everywhere, from politics to public relations, and from sheet music to college sports. "What people intuitively grasped was that new efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones." Therefore, the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance: "what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone."

If I understand Anderson's most important points (and I may not), they include these:

1. Make as much as possible available to as many people as possible.
2. Help them to locate what they need, quickly and easily.
3. Offer maximum inventory only online.
4. Customize supply chain in terms of niche markets
5. Maximize its efficiencies and economies (especially inventory control, order processing, and distribution,)
5. Be customer-driven in terms of "crowdsourcing"
6. Have strategy that separates content into its component parts (i.e. "microchunking")
7. Have a pricing strategy that is "elastic" (i.e. based on the ROI of fulfillment per product per niche).
8. Have an open source business model for information sharing.
9. In markets where scarcity exists, "guesstimate" costs, margins, sales, profits, etc.
10.Where there is abundant competition, let those markets "sort it all out."

These and other points can guide and inform decision makers as they struggle to compete profitably during the era of "long-tailed distributions," when culture is unfiltered by economic scarcity and high technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches. Anderson provides invaluable advice with regard to how minimize the cost of reaching, penetrating, and then developing a multiple of niche markets. The paradigm has shifted from selling more in fewer markets to selling less in more markets but also, key point, selling as much as possible within as many segments as possible -- and prudent -- within those markets.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out two books by Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology and Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape. Also Geoffrey Moore's Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future, Richard Ogle's Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas, Gary Hamel's The Future of Management, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Managers Make Smart Calls, Steven Feinberg's The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't, and Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change co-authored by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, and Erik A. Roth.

3 people found this helpful

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Jorge Luis Borges

Un bon livre mais pas assez d'informations utiles

Reviewed in Canada on March 3, 2010

Le livre d'Anderson est intéressant: il aborde en profondeur un sujet qui se développe rapidement et qui influence la vie des individus et des organisations. Un bémol cependant. L'auteur donne un très grand nombre d'exemples de la manière dont la longue traîne se manifeste. Mais il aurait été intéressant également qu'il fournisse plus de stratégies de la manière d'exploiter ce principe à travers l'Internet et les nouvelles technologies, sujet dont il est supposé être expert.

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Charlotte A. Hu

Comparing this Book with Similar Literature, It's Great!

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2012

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In his book Googled, Ken Auletta talks about the proliferations of websites and blogs and the reality that most are not that good, but most will never know it because Google organizes everything presenting to users only the top rated sites. (Auletta, 2010) In FREE, Chris Anderson explains that the price of digital storage is so low as to be nearly free, (Anderson, FREE: How Today's Smartest Businessess Profit by Giving Something for Nothing, 2010) meaning that stores like Amazon can provide exponentially larger selection than even mega stores of brick and mortar like Super Walmarts. The problem is there are too many choices and consumers must weed through a daunting list of options.

Amazon uses product reviews and product rankings to establish order in this chaos. In virtually any category, Amazon has a top 100. So, given any product, a user can find its ranking based on dozens to 100s of thousands of reviews, then can choose the option of clicking on the 100 products in that category, which will be displayed starting with #1 first.

In Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe (Page 280) uncovers a counter-intuitive fact that while any given single individual in a crowd may have a percentage chance of getting a wrong answer, the larger the number polled, the more likely the majority answer is to be correct. Jeff notes this is how major problems can be solved using crowds much more effectively than using specialists. (Howe, 2009) In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky expounds on this, noting that businesses can solve major issues much more economically by tapping into the crowd, because maintaining a specialist and all their research equipment is pricy, while buying the best answer to a problem presented on the web can be purchased at a fraction of the cost. (Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, 2010)

If Amazon were to attempt, central government and KGB-style to hire a group of experts to rank all their products and tell us what were best, the final product would not have the quality the current ranking does and it would be rather like being told what is best, rather than democratically selecting the best products. The current system amounts to a product election system.

Historically, book reviews were the realm of so-called professionals, rather like publishing and authoring books. However, as Clay Shirky notes on page 55 of Here Comes Everybody, "Everyone is a media outlet." He goes on to note that our social (media) tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is mass amateurization of effort previously reserved for media professionals." He even questions the whole definition of profession and professional. In a world where so many people do things as a hobby in their off-time which are competing with professionals, such as Amazon's books and product reviews. Shirky says mass amateurization breaks professional categories. Discussing solely journalism, but this applies to all publishing, including the publishing of reviews, Shirky says on page 73, "Journalistic privilege is based on the previous scarcity of publishing. Now that scarcity is gone. Facing the new abundance of publishing options, we could just keep adding to the list of possible outlets - newspapers and television, and now blogging and video blogging and podcasting and so on." (Shirky, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, 2008) To which can be added Amazon's book reviews and product reviews. Everyone is welcome to make an account and start reviewing.

Amazon is a huge website, although not the only huge site. Most USG agency websites are huge and many corporate sites are equally daunting. During a survey last year of the US Air Force main website, users' number one complaint was the inability to navigate the site intuitively. In this, intuitive navigation, Amazon's website suite has achieved remarkably high success.

If USG agency websites allowed users to rank content and then organized that content according to rank on a top 100 site by category, the sites may be more user friendly, easy to navigate and informative. For younger groups, this is particularly true of photo and videos by category. However, this categorical ranking of media may be very useful for traditional mass media looking for stock art. One of the functions such sites serve is to provide trustworthy, easy access to basic institutional information.

Self-Publishing

In addition to contributing paragraphs of information on products, Amazon has opened the door for people to participate in their empire by publishing books in print, digital or audio formats. In Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe says the most effective way to be successful today is to allow people to carve out a space on your empire where they can do what they want. (Howe, 2009) In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky talks about how a 40-hour work week and an abundance of education have combined to give lots of people with great knowledge and skills a lot of free time that they often invest in production, not just play. (Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, 2010) Karl Marx noted that the objective of labor for most people is the idea of producing something unique, something that allows a sense of pride. (Marx, Engels, & Tucker, 1978)

Not only has Amazon given people an option to produce and the ability to participate in the Amazon empire, they are reshaping the book industry. During last month's announcement of new products, Jeff Bezos triumphantly announced that 27 of Amazon's top 100 best-selling books are published by independent authors. This looks like the death of traditional publishers. (Calvin, 2012)

Each of these authors has the option to sell books free 5 days out of every 90 and can sell audible versions for free all month long. In his book FREE, Chris Anderson notes on page 161, "the enemy of the author is not piracy, but obscurity. Free is the lowest cost way to reach the most number of people, and if the sample does the job, some will buy the `superior' version." (Anderson, FREE: How Today's Smartest Businessess Profit by Giving Something for Nothing, 2010)

Independent author Adele Marie Crouch has discovered that free versions of her eBooks drive up sales of the print on demand books, which are illustrated bilingual children's books in a range of dozens of languages. Increasingly, the revenues for her small business, Creations by Crouch, come from print sales, while the eBooks versions are cheaper and are often used more as a sample by users than the final product they would read to their children. (Crouch, 2012)

Other websites like YouTube and WordPress also help people upload content and share with the world. This business model is remarkably successful. The question becomes how could USG agencies use this structure to encourage participation in static, bureaucratic websites? Some have tried small projects encouraging photo uploads from a competition like a marathon.

Volunteerism

In addition to the other means by which people can participate, for bragging rights or money, Amazon has a purely altruistic option - formatting and uploading IPR-free, public domain books. In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky asks why people would spend their weekends and evenings participating digitally in building an empire they have no stake in and the answer is pretty much the same reason as they volunteer. They feel good about what they are doing. They want to contribute to something they believe in. (Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, 2010)

Many of these books are edited after they are published. It's part of a new trend that Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody on page 81, which he calls, publish, then filter. "The media landscape is transformed, because personal communications and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact." (Shirky, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, 2008)

While editing books historically was done extensively before printing, now there is no need. A new edition can be loaded onto the Print on Demand, Kindle and audible audio books within one hour and that covers all three formats.

The debate about professionalism, which is to say quality still rages on about these kind of volunteer operations despite the fact that the number one server software in the world, Apache, is not made by a company, but rather a loosely connected group of volunteers. On page 9 of his book Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe notes, "From the Linux Operating System to Apache server software to the Firefox web browser, much of the infrastructure of the information economy was built by teams of self-organized volunteers. (This is) a model of production that is rapidly migrating to fields far and wide." (Howe, 2009)

In a similar move, crowd sourcing based on people's altruistic motives, the State Department deputized college students as virtual diplomats, and they became particularly useful as text message translators during the Haiti hurricane and flooding crisis. Since most of the military and other USG agencies have large communities of retired, spouse and dependent communities, the challenge is how to engage them as part of the public web structure in a useful way that allows them in, but protects against IT invasion of malicious types.

It seems logical that most USG websites could use blogging technology to allow users to comment on any product on the site, including articles, photos, even biographies and fact sheets. It might be possible to use a Facebook login to link the comments users post on government websites to their social media and their microblogging daily entries.

Social Media
Like Buttons on Everything

"Facebook's Like button, introduced in April 2010, has already been added by more than two million distinct websites. The Like button allows Facebook's more than 600 million users, with one click, to express approval of companies, organizations, articles or ideas," Likable Social Media author Dave Kerpen explains. (Kerpen, 2011) While Amazon was an early adopter, so too the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and a few more than a dozen other USG agencies, including, of course, NASA.

Dave explains that the value of the FB Like button is that it expands into the hundreds the basic, traditional advertising form of word of mouth. "Word-of-mouth marketing has always been considered the purest and best form of marketing and social media has continued to prove that fact in many ways." (Kerpen, 2011)

Surprisingly, a news article listed Amazon as a `late bloomer' with regard to the Social Media scene, but this referred to their entrance into paid advertising on Social Media, including Facebook, not so much to their employment of Social Media. On the contrary, Amazon seems like an early adopter and innovator in many of the Social Media applications. In a Business Insider article, Jim Edwards ranks Amazon #24 of out of the top 30 spenders on Social Media advertising. (Edwards, 2012)

Cross Platform Integration

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon has also used crowd sourcing to create and maintain the best online compendium of movie trivia in the U.S. on IMDB, one of the amazingly high ranking websites in the Amazon enterprise. He just announced that this information will be immediately visible while watching Amazon streaming movies via a new tool called "movie X-ray." (Swedlow, 2012)

This is very much in keeping with the concepts in What Would Google Do and In the Plex. (Levy, 2011) Companies like Google and Amazon are a new hybrid of non-profit and business in that they give away a lot of services for free, like search results, supporting their business by seeking revenues from other areas. It's these free services that drive traffic. As Dan Ariely says
In Predictably Irrational, free is not just a price, it's an emotional hot button. (Ariely, 2010)

There's no doubt that government website could benefit from cross platform integration, the question is how and how much. Given today's Congress and budgetary constraints contracting out to hand construct specialized software isn't likely. There doesn't appear as yet to be an open source software that promotes cross platform integration. Some Social Media provide this kind of resource, including posting YouTube or UStream videos, Facebook comments and similar types of free cross platform integration. These would require only the relatively low entry price of a basic knowledge of HTML to integrate the code the various sites produce for this purpose.

Sharing Activity Via Social Media
Amazon.com has had the ability to share purchases for years, but has only just recently added the ability to share product reviews. Now, upon completion of either of these actions, the website asks if you would like to share this activity on Facebook.

This is a simple function that could easily be added to most USG websites and has long been a part of the US Air Force enterprise. While the Army offers the option to Like an article or share it on Google, they don't have the full tool that the US Air Force uses which allows readers to share the product via 328 options. The U.S. Marines, U.S. Department of Defense, DHS, and the White House also use the same function as the U.S. Air Force. U.S. Navy.mil has only the choice to share by email. Nasa.gov allows only to tweet the story, like it or Google + it. However, most executive branch websites like USAID.gov have no share options. This seems like a simple addition to most any USG website that would allow them to better distribute information to a broader base.

The Long Tail

In his book, the Long Tail, Chris Anderson notes that Amazon can carry millions of books, movies or music tracks compared to 100s of thousands by any given brick and mortar store because bytes take up limited storage, alleviating traditional retails storage problems. He further notes that even items on the bottom of the popularity list never reach zero sales. There's always a small demand. This demand, in the aggregate makes revenues as he notes the bulk of Amazon's revenues comes from the bottom 50% of the items listed. The days of Casey Cassem's Top 40 are gone. People are different, and they have niche interests which for the first time in history, they can indulge in. (Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, 2008)

Amazon Allows Anyone to Publish - Even to Niche' Audiences
At the heart of crowd sourcing is allowing people to use your website to make their own products. (Howe, 2009) This is where most USG websites fail, in part due to security concerns. Amazon has created numerous ways in which people can participate in the Amazon empire. Among the most popular is the one that pays them. No reject letters from traditional publishers. One of the challenges is quality. Many people complain that the independently published books lack the copy editing that was common among more traditional publishing.

An interesting trend, traditional publishers are rushing to publish on Kindle and many of them are not formatted well leaving fragmented lines or typos. Many of the independent authors have no copy editors and the end result is one of near equal mediocrity. This isn't good for the industry. Despite these pitfalls, Jeff Bezos announced that people who own Kindles are reading exponentially more than they did before. He suggests this is because the Kindle or audible books read to the reader while they drive, or cook or clean, thereby increasing reading time. Additionally, he announced 27 of the top 100 best selling eBooks on Amazon are published by Amazon as independent authors. (Calvin, 2012)

The challenge then for USG websites is how to incorporate the crowd into the website. Amazon uses a login base with which users create their own accounts. USG IT teams are reluctant to consider this option as it opens up possible in-roads for hackers. USG websites are more frequently targeted by hackers for bragging rights or those with political motives. As such, security on these sites is challenging. However, a huge and famous site like Amazon.com almost certainly has similar security concerns.

A relatively small, non-government site allows photographers to promote the U.S Park Service: [...] It would be great to see a branch of the US government do something similar to promote that branch. This site include by a Photo of the Day, Week, Month and Year selected by voters. This would be an excellent option to move USG websites into the future.

Amazon Offers 1,000s More Music Tracks and Movies - All Digital

"Perhaps the most prevalent e-commerce site is Amazon.com. Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos to sell books on the Web. Since then, Amazon has expanded to sell a wide variety of services in the categories of books, movies, music, games, electronics and computers, home, garden, tools, groceries, health and beauty, toy, kids and babies, clothing, shoes, jewelry, sports, automotive, and industrial. All items are shipped directly to the purchaser." (Schneider & Evans, 2012)

Amazon can Carry a Range of Audio Programs
An average brick and mortar music or book store can carry 100s of thousands of products whereas a digital store can offer millions. The difference in scale is radical. "To offer even more variety, companies such as Amazon have expanded to `virtual inventory' - products physically , located in a partner's warehouse, but displayed or sold on Amazon's site. Today, its Marketplace program aggregates such distribution inventory, products held at the very edge of the network by thousands of small merchants. Cost to Amazon: zero."
For Amazon, this includes private book owners who can sell their used products online either with a free account for people with less than 40 items to sell or a professional account for which they can list an unlimited number of books, books on CD, books on audio cassette, but must pay a monthly premium.

"Digital inventory - think iTunes - is the cheapest of all. We've already seen the effects of the switch from shipping plastic discs to streaming megabits has on the music industry; soon the same will come to movies, video games, and TV shows. News has left the paper age, podcasting is challenging radio, and who knows you may be reading this book on a screen. Eliminating atoms or the constraints of the broadcast spectrum is a powerful way to reduce costs, enabling entirely new markets of niches.

The U.S. Air Force has already started streaming its band performances of IPR free sheet music on [...] The White House routinely streams live broadcasts of the President's speeches and the State Department does similar website broadcasts of speeches by the Secretary of State or other high officials. While some USG websites are taking advantage of the digital capabilities that Amazon.com has already capitalized on, there's more they could do. Live video feeds from Yellowstone are available online and are impressive. The challenge is to push down to all USG websites this kind of innovation and to include a full range of digital video, audio, gaming and podcasting options for all.

Conclusion
Comparing the top producing commercial sites to the top producing government sites, it seems there are a lot of similarities. And while there are a lot of government websites that are not on board with the newest and latest technologies, there are similarly a lot of commercial websites that are still lagging behind. Comparing all government sites to the #1 eCommerce website, Amazon.com, in the United States seems unjust. It seems more logical to compare top performers to top performers, and at the top, they seem to be relatively similar in their creativity. While it seems DOD, NASA and the White House are ahead of the pack, while State, City and small agencies are lagging, very possibly due to manpower and budgetary constraints, as well as the already mentioned security concerns.

Bibliography
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Anderson, C. (2008). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York, NY: Hyperion Books.
Ariely, D. (2010). Predictably Irrational: Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
Auletta, K. (2010). Googled: The End of the World As We Know It . New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Calvin, B. (2012, 09 08). Jeff Bezos Loves You. The Writer's Guide to ePublishing, [...]
Crouch, A. M. (2012, 08 18). Free! Really? Why? Creations by Crouch blog, [...]
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Howe, J. (2009). Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Futu of Business. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.
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Levy, S. (2011). In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster .
Marx, K., Engels, F., & Tucker, R. C. (1978). The Marx-Engels Reader (Second Edition). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Schneider, G. P., & Evans, J. (2012). New Perspecties on the Internet (9th Edition). Boston, MA: Course Technology, Cengage Learning.
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7 people found this helpful

W. Green

The Tails of Two Cats: Manx and Maine Coon

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2013

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The Manx Cat,the powerful King of the Land of Hollyork,was fat and smoked big cigars. He drank martinis for lunch. All day he bellowed, blustered and belched from his throne atop a tall, glassy tower in the big city. Beautiful girls waited on him hand and foot, hoping for an opportunity to please him. He had everything, and everyone wanted what he had. He was the king of the entertainment and business jungle. His stubby but magical golden tail was admired by all. It was the source of all that was good. It created the hit records, movies and books. It sent forward ceaseless waves of ideas, products and services that everyone purchased and used. Favored singers, actors, and writers became heroes. Other very talented people were ignored. Their voices, sometimes very sweet, went unnoticed. This fat cat was in charge. Everything of consequence was produced and delivered by the Manx Cat. The entire world hung on his every word, as they watched their Magic Picture Tubes and reacted to every twitch of his tiny, yet magical tail. He was the King of the Economic Jungle.

Now, there was another cat in a faraway land.The city people in the Manx Kingdom knew little of this part of the world and cared less.This cat was the King of the Land of Maine -- a Maine Coon Cat. Unlike the Manx, he was long of tail,lean and he lived a clean life. His kingdom was larger, more diverse and filled with great multitudes of little people. But they lived in small hamlets far apart from each other. And because the people of Maine lived so far apart, they were unaware of their own goodness and wonder.

Now the Maine Coon was good king. He traveled from village to village honestly admiring the handmade artifacts of his citizens. He would tell everyone he met about the many good works of his people. In each town he would arch his back and waggle his long tail in appreciation of their interesting and diligent efforts. The little people did create many good and different works, but their work went unknown. That is until...one day when a little girl presented the Maine Coon Cat with a special gift. It was a magical White Cube she had been given by an eccentric, but intelligent, bald-headed troll whose workshop was in an abandoned stable. The electric box captured pictures of every product, thing, talent, and service available in the Land of the Long Tail. Most magically, the Cube could send these pictures of goodies to every person in the land, every minute of the day -- and if the people wished hard enough, the pictures became real and words, music, and things of every sort were delivered instantly to the little people. Sometimes they paid for their wish -- sometimes they got things for nothing. It was a strange and wonderful machine. The people of Maine were now united. No longer were they outcast and unknown. Unlike the people of Hollyork who sold in bulk to the masses, the citizens of the Land Of Maine sold their works one by one to discriminating and dedicated customers.The Maine Coon Cat was most grateful to the little girl and to her troll friend as his Kingdom was now important just like the Manx Kingdom. He raised his long tail proudly for everyone to see. And the people cheered him.

Now the Manx Cat really didn't seem to care about the magical White Cube. His tail still had some magic -- but not quite as powerful as before, because the entire world could now see everything everyone had to offer, not just the things that were issued forth by King Manx. Although he took a pay cut, he still smoked cigars and he remained convinced he was king of everything that was important. Faraway, the Maine Coon King continued to live his clean and simple life, and he too was happy because his people were happy. They enjoyed the Kingdom of the Long Tail.

And everyone in the two kingdoms lived happily ever after.

3 people found this helpful

Aaron Hill

A must read.

Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2009

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Wow.

Where to begin with this one.

Even though this book was released a few years ago, the concepts and contents of this book will probably be relevant for eternity, as long as there are means for abundant choice. I highly recommend everyone read this, particularly if you are in either business or technology, as it is relevant to both fields. (specifically: marketing / internet technology)

Essentially, "The Long Tail" refers to a powerlaw curve, where the vast majority of VOLUME is comprised of very few products, and the vast maority of PRODUCTS individually pull a very small number of sales. (The example used by the author is comparing books / CD's offered by Wal-Mart, which sells only hits, versus the books / CDs sold by Amazon.com, which sells pretty much everything you can imagine). It's a contrasting between "hits" and "niches". In a situation where choice is abundant (such as on amazon) a Long-tail distribution will often emerge.

But the true strength of this book is the insight in both the case-studies and applications.

Anderson looks repeatedly to amazon.com, Rhapsody (the music service), social networking sites like Youtube.com or mySpace/Facebook, the iTunes store, and non-long-tail situations like the traditional music and film industry (the people currently trying to sue their way back into relevance), newspapers, and other media that have traditionally flourished in scarce "shelf space" scenarios.

In today's society, Long Tails frequently emerge as the "tools of production are democratized," or as "filters" become easier to access. People are discovering more and more options available, and are, with the assistance of filters and recommendation services (ie. Netflix, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc.) exploring alternatives and new products like never before.

One of my favorite quotes used in this book is regarding television, originally said by David Foster Wallace: "TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." As someone that appreciates both South Park and the Marx Brothers, I can definitely relate. Anderson ties this into his opus through comparing those "vulgar and prurient and dumb" interests to the "hits" culture -- which traditionally had to make the most efficient use of scarce shelf space to maximize sales for the store, the producer, and ultimately the content creator. But in a Long Tail culture, we can explore those refined and aesthetic interests individually, because on the Internet, shelf space is an infinite commodity.

As people are more easily able to produce music, movies, works of art and publish their writing without requiring a high barrier of entry (either economically or temporally), and as the means to seek out these productions becomes easier, it will become more apparent that the demand for this kind of niche content was always there, it was just suppressed by prior technological limitations. Hits will always be hits, but with better filters, those hits will merely serve as lowest-common-denominator entry points to drive people down the tail to other genres and micro-genres they never knew they liked (or existed!).

This book is a must-read. It's not terribly long, but if you have any desire at all to "get" today's culture and the society created by the Internet, this isthe book to start with. (Music & Film Industry people, take note!)

4 people found this helpful

Vincent @ SJU

book review

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2010

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The Long Tail: Why the Future Is Selling Less of More
Vincent

I was always wondering the question that what made Amazon and Ebay become the multinational corporations when I was an undergraduate student in China. After reading The Long Tail, I found the answer to my question. Firstly, I want to give a brief introduction to the theory "long tail" by citing a paragraph on author's blog: "The theory of the long tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare." By understanding the meaning behind this paragraph, which is not difficult, we could get a clear first impression on this topic. In his book, author thinks there are three forces of the long tail: democratization of the tools of production; minimization of the costs of distribution; the connection of consumers to one another. Knowing the forces is not enough, at the end of this book, author gives us two keys for using "long tail" theory well: 1 Make everything available. 2 Help me find it. However, author doesn't detail them, which make audiences have to think about it by themselves.

Case study: digital music in China
In China, we cannot use the "long tail" theory in order to make digital music industry successful. Why? Probably you will ask me this question. First, let's focus on the differences between Internet users in USA and in China. In USA, almost every person can use Internet and many people like using it to purchase digital music. However, the situation in China is totally different: most Internet users' age range from 15 to 35 in China. This means many songs that attract mid-aged or children will be neglected and seldom downloaded. What is more, more than 80% of Chinese citizens live in the country area. Currently, China is still a developing nation and people who live in many country areas cannot get access to Internet. How can people purchase digital music if they cannot have access to Internet? We know this is impossible. E-business is becoming more and more popular in these years in China. Yet, E-business corporations in China don't have that large user base as corporations in USA (like iTunes, Amazon). Due to this disadvantage, digital music companies in China are not able to cause that "long tail" so they cannot make use of it either. Finally, piracy is common in China: people can get free pirate music easily. People won't pay money to buy songs via iTunes.

I am pretty sure we will use "long tail" theory to make digital music industry successful in China one day. However, right now, we have to use the "80/20" theory to make digital music industry gain money.

One person found this helpful

Ricardo Linares

A shift of Paradigm

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2010

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The Long Tail proposes a shift in paradigms. Along his work the author claims that technology has made it possible to shift from a scarcity mindset to an abundance one. The paradigm revolution lies in the limitless CHOICE that the modern consumer has. Technology has made it possible that companies (mostly online retailers) offer an infinite amount of products in a profitable manner. The reason behind this is zero shelf and distribution costs. Computers and internet have made it possible to offer entire collections of digital products without having to spend fortunes in warehouses and shelf space. The variety of songs available in an online music store greatly outnumbers that of any record store which has to fight scarcity. The record store must choose which limited number of albums to carry; each one competes for the limited shelf space available. The record store needs hit albums to survive, the online store doesn't. Hit albums sell good money; non-hits sell a modest or minimal amount of copies, but there are so many of them that they quickly add up and become an important fraction of the total revenue.

The shift in consumer choice does not only mean cheaper products and more options. The long tail principle has ramifications in culture as well. Now that distribution and information bottlenecks have been overcome, communities are less based on geography but more on affinity of tastes and ideas. This in turn gives a chance to niche products to thrive and become an important part of the market. Nevertheless, if there are not filters and recommendations to help people to navigate through the limitless choices available to them, this new paradigm will not translate into a bigger and more realistic demand (the author states that once the logistics impairments are overcome and that all the possible choices are out, the true shape of the demand curve will reveal). Only appropriate connections will drive business from hits to niches. Also, democratization in production and distribution means is necessary to lengthen and fatten the tail. Technology has made this possible in some sectors such as music; garage bands can now record themselves at home and reach millions through the internet uploading their generated contents to sites such as YouTube.

A Final word on the mechanics of the book, the concepts introduced are interesting and backed up by a thoughtful research and observation of the phenomenon; nevertheless, such as this review the author tends to be repetitive on the ideas and drones on. The first chapters develop the idea while the last ones deal more with examples on different industries. Still this is a book worth reading, in addition it also articulates with other books such as "The Future of Competition", "The World is Flat", and "Made to Stick". Along the book there are references to the role of consumers as co-Creators of value with the enterprises. There are references to the increasingly weaker role of geography in the shaping of our cultural and economical landscape as well as the role of word of mouth into connecting people and making ideas or products popular.

One person found this helpful

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