The Long Tail

While wandering the shelves of Borders last week in DC I stumbled upon “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson. Basically he argues that with the advent of online shopping more people are buying more niche products. Because online portals like Amazon.com, Netflix, iTunes, etc have unlimited shelf space they can afford to carry more obscure and specialized products. In other words, give us more choices than just Britney Spears and boy bands.This is allowing people to find products that appeal to their more queerky interests and is making these online portals a great deal of money. While reading it I’ve had many “This is me!” moments when he describes how and why people are gravitating away from those things “popular to the masses” to those things “popular to me.” Anderson based this book off of a popular article he wrote for Wired and is a must read for anyone who’s business is impacted by the Internet.

Oh and for you writing geeks, another great book to check out (that sounds boring but is actually pretty funny) is “Eats, Shoots and Leaves.”

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