i am going to hear chris anderson talk about the long tail later today, so i pushed myself to finish the book in time.

the long tail is a pretty simple concept that anderson is applying mostly to the business world. wait better let wikipedia define it:

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.

A former Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday." In the same sense, the user-edited internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.

 the origin of the book is an article published in wired, which then grew to become a book.

the book got my entrepreneurial cycles going, which not many books do, but overall i think it is a simple concept and phenomenon that does not require 225 pages to explain and analyze. there is A LOT of repetition. at a certain point i thought i am reading "the long tail for dummies".

to anyone who is interested i recommend reading the original article and some of chris's blog entries. …but the book is a good read and it is thought provoking, so maybe you should read the book, too.