Thanks to Chris Anderson’s generous blogger offer i’ve had a copy of his new book “The Long Tail” for review for some weeks now. As i’ve written before i see the image of the the long tail as an iconic image that reshapes our perspective of the world. The icon that ends our mass culture/mass society and sends us in many new directions. A tribute to diversity. A tribute to the sustainability of micro.

Should i read it?
Yes. It’s extremely well-written and an pretty easy read too.

What do you like about?
– that it’s based on actual research data
– that it paints the changes in a historical context
– that it has pretty progressive statements about copyright reform
– the pre/post filter
– the context in which filters are explained

Is it too much a hit?
Well, it’s an easy read . And the publishers shaped it as a business book hit. So yes, it’s been prefiltered to become an hit.

Is The Long Tail an unified theory of the world?
Not really. I would personally prefer to see it as an iconic book and touch on the new perspectives and models (the pre/post filtering could be pretty deep and widely applied to change a lot of fields), but the single chapter that is dedicated to non-entertainment is inherently not that detailed. And a lot of it smells like platforms/ecosystems (salesforce example) that has been possible for a long time and really more is opening up for the possibility of a platform/ecosystem (think the success of Microsoft’s third party developers or how PageMaker saved the Apple Macintosh) than inventory economics. In a sense most of the book is very loyal to the change in inventory economics which is great, but becomes a bit loose when the the long tail metaphor is applied to a variety of phenomenons.

You say it’s an iconic image, is it also an iconic book?
In a 1-2 year time frame it’s pretty iconic and agenda setting i would believe. Long term it suffers from the publishers need to have a short term hit i think.

But read it and decide for your self.