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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
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...
Published on 5 Jul 2007 by Caroline
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43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
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...
Published on 8 Oct 2007 by Professor Donald Mitchell
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43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
When Variety Costs Little More, People Enjoy Having More of It, 8 Oct 2007
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.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Great Book , 5 Jul 2007
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.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A 'Tipping Point' Type of Book, 7 Jun 2007
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A mixed bag, 26 Jul 2008
I finished this book sometime ago, but had to ponder for a while before writing about it. My dilemma revolves around two points. First, it is an interesting, well written, read. Second, the evidence presented is entirely anecdotal.
Anderson's thesis is very simple. The rise of businesses like Amazon and eBay, coupled with the interpersonal communication facilities afforded by the Internet, has effectively created unlimited demand. He argues that he has identified a business opportunity to make a profit in niche areas that were not previously profitable.
The explanation given is fairly simple. The development of the Internet means that more people have access to minority items, and the development of filtering technology, especially collaborative filtering technology, means that people can identify material they are interested in more easily.
The concept is seductive and well argued. Unfortunately, more recent research (the book was published several years ago) is not really supporting the idea. Not only that, but I have been unable to find any examples of successful businesses just based on the long tail model. As the Western world slides into a recession of the next year or so, it will soon become clear whether this is yet another idea from the digeratii which is based on the assumption that the good times will last for ever, or contains some real meat.
Five stars for entertainment value. One star for lack of research!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Simple but infectious, 25 May 2008
Overall I really liked The Long Tail, I found it very interesting, well written and easy to read. The only slight criticism I have, which is the reason for the 4 star rating, is that is does feel as though it could have been shortened a little without losing any of the content.
The overarching idea of the book is that if you can drive down the costs of producing, distributing and finding content, people will start to move away from "hit-driven" mass-market content and start to find a world filled with niches that fill their desires more completely. It's not a particularly complex idea but it has some interesting potential consequences, as highlighted throughout the book.
Whether or not you should completely buy into this, or how far you may see it changing the way people find and consume things such as music and entertainment, is open to debate. What I can say is that since reading the book I have begun to notice elements of the Long Tail in action in many different places.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Simple, Smart Premise No Longer Ignored, 5 May 2008
"The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand" by Chris Anderson claims that thar's gold in them thar hills. He tells us it is not a few big chunks we want, but many small nuggets.
Modern examples are Amazon.com and NetFlix, both of which sell plenty of Harry Potter products and the like. They also (or rent, as is with NetFlix) lots of less popular products. They hit the niche market hard. That's the gold.
The long tail is the curve's far end. At the top of the curve is Harry Potter, for example, along with other New York Times Bestsellers. These products certainly represent a significant amount of sales. However, so do the accumulated number of books and movies which might sell only a few copies a year. Add those up, and there is serious profit. While the tail in the curve is not high, it is long. One copy of, say. The Love, a Hungarian film, and one copy of The Very Best of Ralph Stanley, a bluegrass CD, might not sound like much, but the tail is long. Those, with thousands of other products sold each month, would make their seller very happy.
My own business is built on a long tail method. The market for Hungarian products is not like the Billboard Top 40. It is like the Billboard Bottom 20,000, if there were such a thing. It works.
Anderson's principles can be applied by small businesses like mine, and massive Fortune 500s looking to reach where few are reaching. The markets are there, and, by considering Anderson's ideas, so is the process.
I fully recommend "The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand" by Chris Anderson.
Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com
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Fascinating and entertaining, 6 Nov 2009
This book is a mixture of economics, psychology, history, technology and marketing and they are all used brilliantly to clearly explain and extend the idea. Some of these sorts of books can focus too much on explaining everything in great detail and you're actually left with a 3 page article that's extended into 200 pages of babble. There's so many good examples and interesting quotes in this book I ended up bookmarking about a dozen pages. A fascinating concept beautifully told, read it as soon as possible before the examples go out of date.
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Good concept but most the value in execution, 4 Sep 2009
The Long Tail proposes an alternative economics model for a world of abundance, as opposed to scarcity focused economics, which have been the focus for the field more or less since inception. The idea is reasonably sound and the author does a good work of explaining it and supporting it with relevant examples.
One thing I did enjoy is that the author looked at non-internet based examples as well, broadening the appeal.
However the work suffers from several flaws, as well. Several examples of lacking numeracy spoil some of the enjoyment (as the author is a physicist by training, these are hardly excusable). On top of that, the message, even supported b relevant examples could be squeezed into less than 40% of the book's length - I found the rest to be unnecessary repetition.
If you expect an interesting discussion about web economics, you'll be served well, if you are looking for prescriptive advice on how to really take advantage of the phenomenon, there s none. I do not find tht a problem per se but some readers might.
The reason why I give it 4 stars and not 3, is that the book demonstrates very well that the author believes his own concept - countless examples of trying to make the work more 'findable', or 'linkable' are strewn throughout - I imagine hoping to take advantage of Amazon's text crawling, opefully linking it to very other popular works, which are quoted inside, even if there is no real content need to reference to them. Looking for these was relatively amusing, which eased the frustration of endless repetition of the basic message.
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Riveting Read, 2 Jul 2009
I found this an interesting read. Anderson makes a good point with great erudition. The basic premise is that the far end of a demand curve can generate large volumes of income and that this marks a change in classical economics.
The examples used are for online retail, however, the implications apply to almost any business. The question is, how do you utilise the long tail?
If you are interested in economic philosophy, consider reading this with One Dimensional Man by Marcuse; specifically his comments on whether mass production meets demand or creates artificial need.
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great concept, 28 Mar 2009
Now an accepted concept as illustrated beautifully by bookseller such as abebooks and bookdepository. However it would probably have been better if it had stayed in it's originally article format as it's an overlong repetitious book.
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