The Long Tail is a well known book written by Chris Anderson. The author is the editor-in-chief of the Wired Magazine, a publication on technology, science and mainstream media. The book began from an article in Wired in October 2004, and evolved into a book. The author not only expanded the article’s study, but also gathered all the feedback it got from readers, since it had become a very popular article, and did a relatively big round up on all the books and thesis on similar themes.

It’s hard to categorize The Long Tail. At first it seems a book about economy and commerce. But inside it gives you one of the most detailed studies on the world’s media and how it evolved (and it’s still evolving) into a different, and more promising, market. The book his furthermore a study about a particular characteristic of almost all society based areas. The characteristic is more most easily spotted on the music industry for example. There we have a small proportion of the so called hits that are responsible for a large proportion of the revenue. But if we remove the conditions that force the sellers to choose only the most popular records, conditions like limited store space, and give the buyers a much wider number of choices, they will not only slowly move from the hits to the less known albums, but they will also buy more records and keep coming to where they can choose from a wider selection. However, being able to offer that kind of selection is nearly impossible for the traditional vendors. Now online stores are almost the only ones giving that kind of offer to customers. Amazon, Netflix and iTunes are the most mentioned examples by the author.

The book has a big collection of external opinions from other researches and specially several case studies from with information collected by the own commercial companies of their products and sails. With this data presented in graphics, the long tail, the collection of nearly infinite number of products that didn’t make it into the big marks, is easily spotted. And as Chris Anderson defends, a business who explores this market can get as much as profit as an business that only sells the popular products. Also, and this is the most usual case, if you can offer products for both of the markets you can get a better profit margin and give more satisfaction to their customers.

The Long Tail has clear instructions on how to make you business benefit the power of niches and how there’s a long tail market in every area. But if you aren’t interested in commerce, you can also take a good lesson of the revolution inside the mainstream media and how the society is moving from the hits of the masses to their own selection of personal hits, independent from the marketeers choices.