Book Review - The Long Tail by Chris Anderson

Different types of books serve different purposes, some books tell great stories that motivate and inspire us, other books give practical “how to” advice, others enable us to escape to a world miles away from reality, while others help us make sense of a world that we otherwise wouldn’t understand. I love books that fall into the last category. Some of the recent “classics” in this category include The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell), The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki) and The World is Flat (Tomas Friedman).

The Long Tail is a brilliant book written with similar wisdom and research as these “classics”. In the Long Tail, Chris Andersen (Editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of the Long Tail) explains how the internet is creating distinct shifts in economics and culture. The internet provides consumers with more choice and better search capabilities across different products enabling them to make buying decisions that link closely to their specific interests and needs. This ultimately means that for certain niche products there is an increase in both supply and demand. The internet creates more consumer choice, therefore the demand curve for goods is flattening meaning there is less demand the traditionally popular items (e.g. Brittany Spears and Wilber Smith) and more demand for traditionally less popular items (e.g. Nikolaus Von Knorring, a Swedish soft rock artist and Saltwater Fly Tying, a book by Frank Wentink) creating a long tail on the demand curve. The author uses a number of different and interesting examples to illustrate this phenomenon. In the case of books, a traditional bookstore (e.g. Exclusive Books in South Africa) will typically stock up to 150000 titles in its largest store. This means that consumers must find what they want in amongst those 150000 titles if they are to buy a book. At the same time it is pretty difficult to search books in a bookstore because you physically need to browse through titles on the shelf. The result of this is that certain “blockbuster” books are pushed and less popular books with a niche focus are ignored. The internet changes this equation completely. Firstly, Amazon.com offers the consumer access to 4.5 million book titles and enables them to search for very specific themes and topics in amongst those 4.5 million titles. This means that titles that were previously ignored are being purchased by individuals with very specific interests. In my own case I recently found a book on amazon.com entitled “Researching Entrepreneurship” written by a Professor from Brisbane. 15 years ago I would probably never have even known that this title existed whereas now I was able to purchase it and search other titles purchased by people with the same interest. This concept is exaggerated in the world of music because digital music is not only stored and marketed on the internet, but online music it is highly searchable and is downloadable meaning that you don’t even need to rely on a courier service to deliver the end product.

As we look to the future the Long Tail concept has important implications for:
Movies and DVD’s with a shift from the traditional DVD store and cinema to Netflix and online movie downloads;
Newspapers and magazines with a shift away from paper toward online publishing and blogs;
Travel with a shift away from travel agents towards self service via the internet.
The Long Tail phenomenon is happening and is becoming more and more important as bandwidth increases and more and more products and marketed and sold via the internet.

Check out the authors website at: http://www.thelongtail.com/