Books & Poetry

After ‘Freakonomics’, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ and ‘The Tipping Point’ comes another slab of tendentious commercial anthropology. Wired editor Anderson’s Big Idea, already a staple of broadsheet rhubarbing about MyZzzzpace, is that the internet-driven fragmentation of mass culture into countless niches is having a huge effect on the way things are produced and consumed. In the past, a few films or records or books were money-making hits, and the rest weren’t. But this ‘blockbuster’ model is defunct: America’s top-rated show, ‘CSI’, is watched by only 15 per cent of households with TVs. Today’s bestseller lists are catalogues extending into infinity. And, in economic terms, what’s going on at one end of this long tail is just as important as what’s going on at the other. As Anderson shows, there is value in a niche market of a single person: ‘Everything you put out there finds demand’ – hence the astonishing success of eBay.

Amazon is an obvious promoter and beneficiary of the ‘long tail effect’. Joe Simpson’s book ‘Touching the Void’, first published in 1988, had become hard to find in bookshops by the time Amazon reviewers started comparing it to another mountaineering book, Jon Krakauer’s ‘Into Thin Air’. Amazon noticed, responded by linking the books as Perfect Partners, and voilà – a phenomenon was born. A traditional bookshop would never have been able to react to demand in this way.

One of the big debates in book publishing right now concerns the death of the so-called ‘midlist’ – crudely, all books that aren’t by celebrities or big-name writers. Anderson suggests there’s life in the midlist yet. ‘Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artefacts of poor supply-and-demand matching,’ he writes, ‘a market response to inefficient distribution.’ In other words: build it, and they will come.

‘The Long Tail’ uses a daunting array of case studies to make essentially the same point again and again. But it’s a smart, timely and oddly inspiring book, despite containing rather too many sentences like this one: ‘Does the Long Tail grow the pie or simply slice it differently?’ Show me how to grow a pie and I’ll get back to you.