This is a part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and discusses "Chapter 5 – The New Producers". Part 0 is here. The previous part in this series is here.

At the beginning of this chapter [58] Anderson is back in storytelling mode, taking us to the Kamiokande II observatory in Japan to tell us how "one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century unfolded. A key theory explaining how the universe works was confirmed thanks to amateurs in New Zealand and Australia, a former amateur trying to turn professional in Chile, and professional physicists in the United States and Japan." [60] The story shows, according both to British Think-Tank Demos and to astronomy author Timothy Ferris, that astronomy has shifted from "the old days of solitary professionals at their telescopes to a worldwide web linking professionals and amateurs" [60].

Like the story of Touching the Void in Chapter 1, it is a story that is intriguing by itself, but which has very little relationship to the actual Long Tail thesis. The world of astronomy is a different world from that of Amazon.com. The book is about "The … Continue reading

    This is a part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and discusses "Chapter 4 – The Three Forces of The Long Tail". Part 0 is here. The previous part in this series is here.

Chapter 4 is a really short chapter (6 pages, including 3 diagrams and a table) which sketches the three forces of the Long Tail (and also the six themes of the Long Tail age – what is it with numbers?) Subsequent chapters talk about each force in turn. So this is a really short post as well.

Given that it is short, this might be a good place to put the canonical picture of the Long Tail. So here it is.

The idea is that you arrange a set of products in decreasing order of popularity along the horizontal axis, and plot their popularity up the vertical axis. The first few are the most popular items (the hits) and as you go to the right you go past many individually less and less popular items. There are a lot of items in the yellow area, and while there is … Continue reading

Back from doing some actual work for a few days, this is another part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and discusses "Chapter 3 – A Short History of the Long Tail". Part 0 is here. The previous part in this series is here.

Chapter 3 is a complement to Chapter 2 and completes Part One of the book (although it’s not labelled as such). While Chapter 2 set out to chart the rise and fall of the blockbuster, Chapter 3 charts the rise and rise of the Long Tail in a short ten page trip from the Sears Catalogue the web and beyond. It’s a short chapter, and a digression from the main thread of the book, so I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. But I said I’d go through chapter by chapter so I will.

The first section describes the rise of the Sears Wish Book and the catalogue retailing business. The catalogue allowed people – especially those in small towns and rural areas (as piefuchs pointed out in comments on the previous part) – to choose from a much wider range of goods than … Continue reading

This is part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and discusses "Chapter 2 – The Rise and Fall of the Hit". Part 0 is here. The previous part in this series is here.

A book that paints a big picture, as The Long Tail does, and especially if it is paints using an informal, storytelling brush, can be difficult to refute. Point out the problems with any one story and you can be accused of splitting hairs — that one story is just a little piece of the picture, and if it’s a bit inaccurate then it doesn’t affect the basic thesis. On the other hand, if you make big claims and say that "it’s all wrong" you lose as well, because that’s unconvincing. So if you really want to refute a book (and yes, reader, that is what I want to do) then you’ve got to go through it page by page, example by example, and make your case.

A big picture really does have to be backed up by real data and real mechanisms somewhere, and the onus is on the author to provide that data and those mechanisms. Anderson fails to … Continue reading

This is part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and discusses "Chapter 1 – The Long Tail". Part 0 is here. The previous part in this series is  here.

Chapter 1 starts with the story of the mountaineering book Touching the Void being lifted from obscurity a decade after its publication by online recommendations at Amazon.com. It’s a nice story, and while I haven’t read the book, the film of Touching the Void is gripping and moving. But what does this story tell us? "By combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion, they [online booksellers] created the entire Touching the Void phenomenon… Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it." [16]

But this is, after all, just a story, and this is not the first time a product has been lifted from obscurity by a sudden word of mouth. In fact, the opening pages of The Tipping Point feature a story that is very similar – the return of Hush Puppies into style after an extended period in the commercial wilderness, as a result of word of mouth in the New … Continue reading

This is part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and discusses the Introduction. Part 0 is here. The previous part in this series is  here.

After taking two posts to get past the cover, you may be very glad to know I have nothing to say about the dedication page or the acknowledgments. This exercise will be long-winded enough without that. Yes, I’m ploughing on, turning pages recklessly past the Table of Contents and all the way to the Introduction. But I’ll stop there, and look at it closely.

The point of an Introduction is pretty similar to the cover. It’s to set out the main themes of the book, to sketch the argument, and so to draw the reader in. Some writers call it Chapter 1 (that’s what I did) and others don’t call it a chapter (that’s what Anderson does), including it as part of the front matter for the book.

Unsurprisingly then, some of the things I have to say here will repeat what I said about the cover. Anderson starts off by talking about the world we are in now, and this world is "the world the blockbuster built" [1]. (Remember, … Continue reading

This is part of my critical reader’s companion to The Long Tail and it discusses the cover. Part 0 is here.

I know, I know. Never judge a book by its cover. But books sell themselves based on their cover, even in the digital world, so covers matter. The cover is the author’s chance, and the publisher’s chance, to tell us in a few words and images what this book is all about before we put down our dollars or euros and buy it. At some point we all judge books by their cover: what does The Long Tail‘s cover tell us to expect in this book?

At the top of the cover on the edition I have (probably the Canadian edition) is the phrase "The New Economics of Culture". On some other editions, like the one shown above, the phrase is "How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand". Either way the message is clear, and it sets the tone. New Economics of Culture, Unlimited Demand, Endless Choice: these are grand phrases proclaiming big ideas about dramatic change.

The title … Continue reading