This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 10 – The Paradise of Choice. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

The purpose of this chapter is to counter "the notion that ‘too much choice’ is overwhelming, a belief so common and ill-founded that it deserves its own chapter" [167].

The last 50 years have seen "an explosion of variety" [169], which Anderson ascribes to three factors. The first is "globalization and the hyperefficient supply chains it brings"; the second is the change in the population – in the US, he mentions ethnic diversity and increasing affluence, leading to a cultural shift from "I want to be normal" to "I want to be special"; the third is The Long Tail – or the proliferation of variety brought about by iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, and eBay.

But there’s variety and then there’s variety. Grocery shopping is often a focus for this kind of discussion (and the book uses it in the next section) so let’s use supermarkets as a way into the topic. For me, the proliferation of options at the … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the second half of Chapter 9 – The Short Head. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

The second half of Chapter 9 is a meandering stroll around the topic of "finding things". It’s an odd place for it in the book – this reads like a part of Chapter 7 – The New Tastemakers that has wandered into the wrong part of the book by mistake. Warning – this is even more rambling than the other posts in the series: it is more of a set of half-baked thoughts than a coherent thesis. But hey, this is a blog.

In the Library of Misshelved Books [156-160] starts off this way: "One of the most vexing problems with physical goods is that they force us into crude categorization and static taxonomies, as we saw with Wal-Mart. That means a windbreaker can be in the ‘Jackets’ section or the ‘Sports’ section, but not in a ‘Blue’ section or ‘Nylon’ section" [156]. A thing has to be in one place or another but not … Continue reading

Hits really are as big as ever. Link: BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Record print run for final Potter.

A record 12 million copies of the final Harry Potter book are to be released in its first US print run.
Publisher Scholastic said July’s release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would be supported by a multi-million dollar marketing drive.

Meanwhile, Waterstone’s is getting caught in the big vice between the online retailers and the big grocery chains, (see previous post for how this has affeected CDs)

HMV is planning to close up to 30 of its Waterstone’s book shops, give
more space to higher margin items and reduce the number of high brow
books, as part of an overhaul to restore the fortunes of the struggling
business. Details of the restructuring were announced yesterday as HMV
issued yet another profits warning, sending its shares almost 16% lower
to 128.5p…

The books and music retailer is facing an onslaught from all sides; the
growth of digital music through the likes of iTunes, online retailers
led by Amazon … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses the first half of Chapter 9 – The Short Head. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

Before I start, a tip of the hat to Aaron Swartz for his kind review of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart – even if he does think my politics are odd – and for pointing to this series of posts on Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. And welcome to all those readers who have followed the link. Hope you can stick around – I’m going to be posting two or three things a week until I get to the end of the book, which will probably take a week or two.

The first half of this chapter compares shelves with online stores in a little more detail than earlier chapters, looking at "the virtues of shelves and their costs" [147] as well as the benefits of "the Internet, where niche economics rule" [166]. The second half (coming later this week) looks at how you find things. Let’s get to … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses a piece of Chapter 8 – Long Tail Economics that I missed yesterday. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

I meant to write about page 141, but I didn’t.

What happens on page 141 of The Long Tail is that Chris Anderson acknowledges, for the first and only time in the book, how some word of mouth effects can run counter to the long tail forces he talks about. Dipper asked the question, back in comments on Chapter 1, "One reason people buy arts and cultural products such as books, dvd’s, games, clothes, cars is to participate in cultural life. that means buying what other people are buying". Anderson phrases the question here, in a section on music and how the one-big-powerlaw is composed of many little powerlaws:

The characteristic steep falloff shape of a popularity powerlaw comes from the effect of powerful word-of-mouth feedback loops that amplify consumer preference, making the reputation-rich even richer and the reputation-poor relatively poorer. Success breeds success. In network … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 8 – Long Tail Economics. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

By this time in the book we’ve seen variants on the long tail graph a lot of times.
 

The chapter is a collection of observations about this shape. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this chapter, so this is a short post.

The chapter starts by talking about the Pareto 80/20 rule (that 20% of the people in populations Pareto studied owned 80% of the wealth) and Zipf’s Law (that the frequencies of use of words in the language follow a similar kind of fall-off). These and others are examples of power law distributions that crop up in a bunch of different places. Power laws are called long-tailed curves because "the amplitude … approaches but never reaches zero as the curve stretches out to infinity" [126]. This is true of many kinds of distributions, of course, including exponential and log-normal distributions. But even within … Continue reading

This is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail, and it discusses Chapter 7 – The New Tastemakers. Part 0 is here. You can find a complete list of the Long Tail pieces here.

In a comment on Chapter 6, John points us to an article which mentions Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science.These laws are:

Laws 2 and 3 remind us that the whole publishing process is about guidance. Guiding readers to books they like, and guiding books to readers who like them. The various stages of writing, submitting to publishers, editing, publishing, publicising, reviewing, discovering, recommending, locating, browsing, requesting, buying/borrowing, delivering are one path through the maze that is needed to guide books to their readers and readers to their books. Guidance is the subject of Chapter 7.

I want to leap ahead some pages … Continue reading