Right before Christmas break, I finished reading Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. I’d heard about this book from various sources, such as my Wired Magazine subscription, and through related web-searches regarding concepts of non-gaussian distributions from Nassin Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness and Benoît Mandelbrot’s The Mis-Behavior of Markets such as power-law distributions. Suffice to say, this book held up to my expectations, and is still challenging the way I think.
The Long Tail is about how information technologies are transforming many markets, and about the true shape and character of market these technologies reveal.