The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

I picked up this book in the South Coast Plaza mall a while back and found it fascinating. All around me the well dressed, up and coming, young, middle class professionals and workers of Los Angeles were shopping in stores to find the latest in fashionable goods. Each and every one of them hoping to distinguish their existence from the crowd (and score one over the neighbors) with a deft purchase. (Including the lonely people in the bookstore flipping through books popularizing distribution curves). Each person in that mall had a sense of what they were looking for - not too far from the norm bit not too common either. 'The Long Tail' by Chris Anderson makes the argument (repetitively) that with the advent of the internet we can expect choice to proliferate wildly. What used to be a bookshop with 10 thousand books becomes a choice of over 4 million books in an online store. This is not a new transition. Sears-Roebuck a century ago created a catalog with millions of entries, distributed it far and wide, and leveraged the rail network to exchange the loose change of farm hands across the nation for cheap watches, guns and soap. The enablers of the long tail revolution are reduced advertising and distribution costs (the internet), reduced production costs (particularly for forms of information like music), and increased communication between like minded folk - as fostered by the internet. Although it is hard to disagree that Amazon et al have made finding rare books easier, I could not agree with this as being a radically new trend. The problem is that people do not want to go out on a limb - they want to be fashionable and part of being fashionable is wearing what everyone else is wearing and fitting in. Why are little old corner coffee shops called Starbucks popular? Why do they suddenly become unpopular? To be fair - Chris does not attempt to address the phenomena of fashion but just the fact that the odd choices section of the market will now tend to get larger with time. Chris mentions the 80/20 rule - as in 80 percent of the profits come from 20 percent of the customers - and dismisses it as being no longer relevant in the online world as the cost of production can become vanishingly small for even the rarest informational products. The 80/20 rule mixes units - as Chris points out - the 80 percent refers to profits and the 20 percent refers to fractions of the customer base. So there is no reason that the rule should not be 80/10 - and indeed this is a more common fraction in Chris' (and my experience). The key to profitability would seem to be not in focusing on the key customers (sorry '4 Hour Workweek') but on making sure that costs are as small as possible. All in all, I give this book a 4/5 - mainly on the strength of the tales (no pun intended) about Google, eBay, Amazon and Sears - these are the people who are making 'The Long Tail' possible and making it work.
More FictionFobic Reviews.