This book is a fascination because in to reveal insights that I have not previously had. Basically the long tail relates to the sale of products that most users are and sellers pay very little attention to because there are not that many of them.

However, Anderson demonstrated very clearly, especially in chapter 2, that not only is the long tail real but it's extremely important. I have to say however, that after chapter 2, I found this book repetitive and a little bit tedious.

Basically, the reason to the tediousness is that Anderson has used a very restricted number of examples in this book. He concentrates enormously on the music industry, the sale of CDs, the downloading of songs from the Internet and music in general. He does eventually move on to other products but by that time it has become tedious.

the long tail, then, he is best described by the diagrams on page 1921 23 and 25. On page 25 diagram entitled online music popularity (Rhapsody, Dec 2005) illustrates the long tail by showing titles ranked by popularity on the horizontal axis and the number of downloads on the vertical axis. The key to understanding the long tail is to appreciate that there are 25,000 songs available at Wal-Mart and Rhapsody, for example, but then as a further million and more songs available only and Rhapsody. It's these 25,000 plus songs that form the Long tail in this example.

Anderson makes the same point about Amazon.com and your average town centre bookshop. The bricks and mortar bookshop might stock 5000, 25,000 or even the hundred thousand titles: they are in the short tail. Amazon.com ostensibly stocks one million, 2 million, and books. Of course, in reality Amazon.com stocks very few books; but it has these millions of edible the sale. Again, it's these books beyond the 100,000 that represent the long tail.

Now that we know what the long-term is, good to do? The point is, that these companies and people who appreciate that there is a long tale realise that even though they may sell relatively very few of those products in the long tail, they do sell and they do add value and there is profit to be made.

In the diagram on page 23, the new growth markets: products you can't find anywhere but online; Anderson shows the number of products available at Rhapsody, Netflix and at Amazon; and he makes the kind of comparison I just made with bookshops and Amazon and Wal-Mart and Rhapsody. The figures really astonishing.

The people who really need to know about the long tail work in the marketing department; because knowing about the long tail and what's in it, what is potentially and it, must be vital to them to know. After all, once Amazon sort out its long-term profitability you could very well take over the world! I have to confess I don't know Rhapsody and Netflix but from what I read in the long tail, the same could be true of them.

Anderson gives a very good example of the potential power of the long tail on page 156: 'of the estimated 30,000 new album is released each year, Wal-Mart carries just 750, according to David Gottlieb, a former label executive. That works out to only 2.5% of the new music released each year and the 4,500 unique CD titles that Wal-Mart carries in its stocks are less than half of 1% of all the music available ... it's ironic, this paradox are plenty: walk into a Wal-Mart and you're overwhelmed by the abundance of choice. Yet look closer and the turf in this of this cornucopia is revealed. Wal-Mart shelves a display case milewide and 24 inches deep. At first glance they may look like everything, but in a world that actually a mile wide and a mile deep of an era variety just isn't enough.'

On page 92 there is another diagram, again showing the long tail, that illustrates three economic cut-off points: physical retailers, hybrid retailers and pure Digital retailers. Physical retailers are the bricks and mortar kind; hybrid retailers including Amazon.com which stores with no retail overheads; and pure Digital retailers include Rhapsody and stores with no physical goods. according to this diagram on page 60 whilst hybrid retailers are in the long tail, the pure Digital retailers could be said that the real long-term players.

Book Sales 2004
sales range	titles	units
1,000,000 or more	10	17,396,510
500,000 to 999,999	22	13,798,299
250,000 to 499,999	64	22,252,491
100,000 to 249,999	324	46,932,031
50,000 to 99,999	767	51,858,835
5,000 to 49,999	23,047	280,000,591
1,000 to 4,999	67,008	149,093,614
100 to 999	202,938	69,548,499
sold 99 or less	948,005	14,346,417
total	1.2 million	665 million +

By way of a summary of this table Anderson says this, the consequence of this is that whatever you are looking for, there's more stuff you aren't looking for the farther you go down the tail

Looking at the long-term from Bierce letter different perspective, and is contrasts mainstream media with blogs as they compete retention on line. He sure is a diagram on Page hundred and 87 that lists the top 30 of 40 blogs in terms of incoming links from other sites and he shows mainstream media, for example, the New York Times, CNN and, the BBC; but buried in there are blogs called Boing Boing, Engadget, PostSecret, and Daily Kos, none of which he is mainstream media but they are popular.

This is a peculiar one: in chapter 10 Anderson talks about choice and the possible effects of having too much choice and he taught about having tasting sessions and jams, as in Strawbridge raspberry and so on; and then he says, 'and they also uploaded a weird jams such as lemon curd.' Excuse me, lemon curd is my very favourite jam! Maybe it's an English thing!

so, whilst I have found the book very interesting and I would recommend it is a good read for all intermediate or advanced students are marketing and business studies and accounting people in general, I did find it repetitive in terms of the examples that Anderson gave. Nevertheless, companies like Rhapsody and Netflixs curry thriving on this long tail.

Duncan Williamson
9^th June 2007