There are so many things I like and admire about this book. Here are just a few:
1. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Unlike best-sellers like Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, it is not just a collection of anecdotal incidents with potential explanations. It is a complete theory of what's going on with Internet retailing. It all hangs together.
2. It is well-illustrated, not only with word stories, but with graphs, charts, tables, and other aids to understanding.
3. It is extremely well written and understandable.
4. It is very timely. As an author in "the long tail" myself, I appreciated the up-to-date examples and the seamless way the author moves between classical economic theories and the most modern hypotheses.
5. The narrative moves readily from chapter to chapter, building the case for the author's theories and explanations without any jarring jumps or gaps in logic.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I recommend this book to anyone who is trying to understand how and why the Internet is changing the world of production and retailing in so many niches, not only that it is changing them.

Anderson does an admirable job bringing a key idea in online media distribution to the business world. He tells the story of this one idea passionately and coherently. However, if you're looking for a wealth of ideas and how they relate to society, this book is not for you, because it only tells the story of how one relates to the business world: the "long tail." This is both the upside (very readable) and the downside (repetitive) of the book.

Anderson frequently uses anecdotal evidence drawn from personal observations. Not that there is anything wrong with this in a book of this sort, but many of the ideas he brings to the table have been better explored with other books, such as Henry Jenkins' "Convergence Culture" which discusses participatory culture in a transmedia environment. There is a sprinkling of supporting statistical data, but he tends to take liberties with the meaning of these data, oversimplifying it. The result of anecdotal evidence and somewhat generous readings into statistical (not experimental) data is that he tends to overstate the importance of the long tail distribution model. The statistics he presents are somewhat less alarming that he interprets them to be. These liberties give a very utopian spin to the book, when the "long tail" could be viewed as having negative or neutral connotations. It would have been nice to see a more balanced reading, but what would you expect from a WIRED magazine editor?

It should come as no surprise that the editor of Wired magazine, that bible of all things technological, should be overly enamoured with the significance of the internet, but even so, only someone totally besotted with it, and apparently unaware of the world beyond it, could have written a book like The Long Tail, being as it is informed so deeply by such a utopian (or dystopian, depending on how you look at it) view.

Chris Anderson believes the internet has changed the fundamentals of economics, for all places, for all time. He's not the first to think this, of course: legions of young investment bankers, now deceased, made a similar mistake in those first few giddy months of the new millennium before the bubble burst. I can still remember the hubris; the outrageous scepticism which greeted ginger mumblings that things might be in la-la-land. Traditional business models were over. No longer did you need to have anything old fashioned like cashflow, or a business model which might actually render some profit. Well, those young bankers, and their clients, got burned, and even now their successors and survivors shudder at the prospect of making the same mistake. And while Chris Anderson hasn't made that particular mistake, he's made an analogous one: he's assumed that some undeniable developments in that (actually fairly slim) part of the economy that he knows about will necessarily revolutionise the whole caboodle.

For Anderson now, just as for those currently redundant young masters of the universe then, we're on the cusp of a brave new world.

And, just as they were not, he's not completely wrong, either: There *is* a phenomenon called the long tail (there always has been; the difference is that it's now sometimes economic to venture down it). And it's true, that opportunity it has been created by confluence of technological developments we're beginning to call the digital revolution. It's also true that the internet has radically changed, forever, some business sectors: those that deal in the digital revolution, and in particular "intellectual property", which has been most profoundly affected by it: publishing; the music and film industries, and the industries surrounding the web itself.

But it needs to be kept in perspective. For the rest of the economic world - and for those not dazzled by the e-froth, that's quite a lot of it - it's business as usual. The long tail won't matter a damn. As long as there's a physical good that needs to be manufactured, shipped and warehoused somewhere pending sale, the long tail - which is as there as it ever was, will be just as inaccessible.

The point is that the long tail wags only for those artefacts whose main value is intangible - which can be practically separated from the physical "thing" that contains them. For example: shorn of the intangible intellectual property inside it, the physical manifestation of a book, as an artefact, is (largely but not completely) valueless. A compact disc, as an artefact, is completely valueless. The digital revolution has allowed each of us, as never before, to quickly separate the valuable bit from the physical bit. Being a string of ones and zeroes, and thanks to Moore's Law, the cost of replicating the valuable bit of intellectual property is nil. Once consumers can accept the valuable bit without its "thing" the supply/demand curve looks very different, since the supply curve starts at an enormous amount, for one unit, then immediately drops to a micron above zero for the second, and flatlines there until infinity. The only limiter is demand. And, though Anderson doesn't think so, demand isn't unlimited. You can only listen to so many CDs, and read so many books.

But for trucks, and bricks, and oil, and commodities most of the long tail effect will be muted at best, and unobservable for the most part. Sure: businesses will be able to minimise warehousing costs off the

The explication of the reach of the new niche markets is brilliant. No longer does the retail economy depend on "the next big thing", the real blockbuster, but Chris Anderson has correctly identified the splintering of the economy and the resulting plethora of opportunity.

Add the Internet to the bricks and mortar and you can really see this proliferation of "less of more." A new book "Internet Riches" by Scott Fox extends this thesis. This book is packed with real life examples of web success stories and strategies, some amazingly off-the-wall that would never have succeeded (or existed) in the old economy. The new economics of distribution delivered via the Internet has brought commercial viability to unique ideas and small niche markets all because of the 40 million people out there "browsing".

The book correctly points out the changing face of the retail business in this country, beyond the media. In a sense it also goes the opposite direction also. Because of the proliferation of products and the world wide distribution system brought about by e-commerce you can find goods that used to be one-of-a-kind have been copied by the large retailers and what used to be unique is unique throughout all the Pottery Barn, West Elm and Crate and Barrel homes around the world. The long tail of innovative goods gets quickly snapped up and replicated for all to own.

Overall this is an excellent selection. I purchased the audio book rather than the hardcover book. I'm glad I did as this book I would think would be rather difficult to read just by its shear volume and the "50 dollar words" that are used throughout the audio. It opened my eyes and actually gave me an idea to start my own blog ([...]) based on the book. I did that so I could try and bring the idea down to the layman's level of understanding. One thing for sure the idea hits the nail directly on the head.