I give up...I can't take any more of this horribly boring book. My economics textbook keeps my interest better than this, which is extremely sad. I'm giving it two stars instead of one only because it had a few good tidbits of information regarding the evolution of the music and publishing industries (there was some interesting stuff about things such as Myspace and Lulu that I hadn't heard before). None the less, this is another book about an idea that probably made a fascinating article in a m...

The book is amazing, it is just outdated, written 12 years ago, before Facebook, twitter, youtube, spotify and netflix.We are basically living now what he described in the book as what might happen with the development of the long tail.

This book is an exploration of how niche markets are on the rise courtesy of better distribution. And that's a gross summary. Much discussion is given to the rise of the digital world and how it's expanded the marketplace so that there can be a Long Tail Distribution (for you statistics nerds out there)--- beyond the major hits, you can continue to sell (for example) less popular items, and lots of them. There are markets within markets.A very conversationally written book, by the editor of Wire...

Ideas now seem a bit outdated in 2022 world IMO (economies of scale from successful creatives or the 1st/2nd place winners of categories will allow them to continue to dominate + attention fatigue continues to allow the winners to be the easier pick or option for consumers, ie paradox of choice is still very powerful)Refreshing (in today’s age) and interesting to hear the optimism of the advent of the web2.0 era though

This book was a bit of a weird read because it was written far enough ago now that a bunch of its references and case studies are out of date. For example, it was talking about Blockbuster and Napster, which are hardly relevant in 2020.But still, the ideas in this book are super important and have influenced a whole generation of businessmen and marketers, and so even though bits of it felt out of date, it was still very much worth reading. True, if you’re already familiar with the overall conce...

I’ve read this book many years ago and revisited it now in 2018 as a way to see how many or little things have changed. This is a book written when - quote - “YouTube was a 6 months old website”, and “Netflix will some day go into streaming rather than sending movies on DVDs”. Definitely worth reading on the long tail theory which absolutely applies to today’s market and products. Heck we even see a long tail of products now (apps)!

OK, this book gets down-graded because it is an excellent example of snake oil. Kool Aid. Let me explain. I'm sure that some people love this book. However, Chris Anderson takes an excellent insight, then extends and extrapolates this insight all out of shape, drawing general conclusions about the whole economy that make absolutely no sense.First, consider the source. Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. If you've never read Wired, it is a huge media cheerleader for the high

The author, with clairvoyance, offered a vision into the Long Tail of E-Commerce, so much so that the term has become the generic industry name for the concept. It's a brilliant book, one that's a must read for anyone interested in E-Commerce selling, inventory and stocking for non-physical businesses. The Long tail has also revolutionized lives of many small/micro sellers on large platforms like Amazon, and this book is a good primer for first time sellers too.

Interesting Tidbits - Three forces need to create the long tail: 1. democratize production: give average people the ability to create quality content (movies, music, blogs) 2. democratize distribution: technology to aggregate *all* the content in a genre (Amazon, Netflix, iTunes) 3. Connect Supply and Demand: filters to help people find the niche's they are interested in (Google, recommendations, best-seller lists) - One quarter of Amazon's sales come from books outside its top 100,000 titles. T...

I’ve been reading what I like to think of as some “business-lite” books for school, pulling me (kicking & screaming) away from my beloved novels, fictional worlds, and imaginary characters. Apparently there is little or no place for novels in business. The good news is that these business-lite books are, by their very nature, super-readable and somewhat interesting. They are also (again, I guess by their very nature) the most repetitive books imaginable. While I like novels, and have even read s...

Chris Anderson's book can be summarized by saying that the consumer retail market these days is driven more by a bottom-up movement (what he calls "post-filters") than by top-down factors ("pre-filters"). The idea can also be synthesized by saying that "hits" are no longer as big as they once were because they now compete with individuals with louder voices.For example, during its most popular seasons, "I Love Lucy" was watched by 70 percent of households with televisions. That kind of homogeniz...

I disliked this book for two reasons: I do not believe it represents any original ideas and it is, like most business books, horribly verbose. Yawn-zilla. Yawn-a-saurus rex. Avoid.I take issue with the idea that this book even represents a body of original ideas. The long tail concept is very cute, but after reading it, I can't stop thinking about the story of Sears-Roebuck which Anderson writes about. The notion of giving people access to a plethora of products that were heretofore unobtainable...

Capitalism. Capitalism everywhere. This could have easily been left to a 15 min Ted talk and you'd have got all the main points of it.

one of the most important guides to the dotcom econ - although after a while you might get tired of being told of the same thing over and over again (esp Wired readers might find it annoying of being told what they've discovered a long time ago) each of the stories page after page are another nail on the coffin - and most of us down here in ANALOG INDONESIA with rolling blackouts (wiping out your lifetime of data in seconds) can just dream away. a must-read for non-practitioners, and a good conf...

One of the most interesting non-fiction books I've ever read. Sort of a combination of economics, technology, and culture. Anderson presents compelling arguments and data to identify, examine and extrapolate on a clear inflection point in the macro environment today. Tools of production are more readily available (think desktop publishing, blogging, and digital video), distribution is cheaper and more widely available (think Netflix, iTunes or Amazon v bricks-n-mortar), and a wide range of recom...

Such biz. books, where the author is laying out a pattern, idea or a concept, are interesting when those ideas are exemplified i.e. the cases with which the author's trying to prove their point. Those are the most interesting patches for me, though at times things just feel repetitive.

I heard a clip on this book on NPR back in August and have had wanted to read this book for sometime. When I first heard about this book, we were having a conflict with one of our e-commerce customers. There SKU base kept growing and my boss kept saying they did not control their inventory. Well, here is proof positive that they did know what they were doing. The book is written by an editor of Wired magazine. The basic premise is that with infinite variety and reduced (and in many cases zero) d...

We discussed the phenomenon in our MBA classroom for Long Tail marking an important trend in consumer behavior/consumption. Thanks to the huge cost reduction from technology improvement, from new business model (network/sharing economy), fat tail products could reach farther to its potential customers. The book, however, delivers in a messy and repeated structure. What was delivered in 250 pages could easily done in an half without losing its sharpness and accuracy.

[written in 2006]I’m sitting here at my computer in Homer, writing this review in email, fixing to send it off to Barbara in Scottsdale, for publication in either the eNews or the Poisoned Pen newsletter, to be read by subscribers all over the nation and the world.  And suddenly I realize, Barbara is obeying one of the dictums of the Long Tail -- she’s letting the customers do the work.  I’m in the middle of a marketing revolution of which I could only see some parts some of the time.  Now that

The book, and its main idea of the Long Tail, has seriously affected the way I see many industries. When the digital book world started really taking off, after Amazon jumped in, I found myself referring to it in discussions of the future of the publishing industry. The internet has allowed businesses to reach consumers (and for consumers to reach businesses) who fall out of the majority--who "live" in the long tail. An important book in helping understand the effect the internet has had on reta...