Reading: the Long Tail

Long Tail (cover)If you have any interest at all in business, economics, and the Internet, Chris Anderson’s Long Tail is a must-read. He explains in very understandable terms how scarce shelf space dictates a “hit”-based economy, and how the essentially unlimited inventory available through the Internet fundamentally changes the equation.

The most compelling ideas have to do with the three forces of the Long Tail (p. 54 and following):

  1. Wide availability of the tools of production means more stuff gets produced (a longer tail)
  2. Democratized distribution means more access to “niches” (a fatter tail)
  3. Connecting supply and demand (esp. through improved search, filtering and recommendation) means more business moves from the “hits” (the steep head of the tail) to the “niches”

Logos seems in many respects to be a good example of a Long Tail business: though we have initial production costs associated with producing titles in digital format, we aggregate demand across a much larger group than a typical bookstore, so we can support our “niche” (and sub-niches within it). And our community pricing model provides a very effective mechanism for determining which titles to produce when and for how much.

As some other reviewers on Amazon have noted, the book itself has a bit of a long tail: most of the interesting stuff comes early on in the book. And i could quibble that, while he’s appropriating as “his curve” something that Pareto and Zipf noted a long time ago, they don’t actually get mentioned until halfway through. That doesn’t seem quite fair to history, but he does have some interesting comparative comments about how the Pareto Principle or 80/20 changes with the Long Tail. Overall, though, i can’t be too critical since he was willing to comment on, and link to a post on our blog about the Zipfian distribution of names in the Bible (which Blogos readers saw first).