Let me start by saying that this book would be for folks who liked Freakonomics and who enjoyed the google story. Its unconventional and although not in the same class as Freakonomics is still a very good read. Whats a Long tail? Simply put its that end of the Normal curve which we cut out cos we think that the business areas or the majority of the population lies somewhere close to the mean of the population. To make things a little more easy to understand, lets look at what a typical music world or a planet m would stock? Hits, best sellers and a collection of unconventional stuff. if I take a plot of number of titles sold versus the rating of the album we would find that the music store stores around 80% of top 20 and may be 50% of top 50 albums.
The long tail says that this constraint exists due to the fact that there is a constraint on the resources used to store a cd which is the rent per square foot and the pressure to generate profit for that space. Now imagine a digital world, napster, Which stores millions of songs as the cost of keeping them is almost zero; in that case even the most nonsensical music track is there, but would it sell.the Long tail proves that as u keep on adding titles, there will be a audience to it, at no point of time will a new title not have any buyers over a reasonable amount of time. The book beautifully explains that this phenomena can be extended to physical products as well if they are made to assemble.
Through this, infinite variety can be offered to the customer as is done by Dell which has nth combinations of all the component variations . Each dell pc is sitting as a permutation -combinations of what you choose online, in reality it does not exist as long as you press the OK button.Thus the next wave of customer acquisition will come from those firms which offer the greatest variety to the consumer, google, amazon are perfect examples. The book however fails to give more examples than the usual books and music titles. Dell was one example I thought myself, google was another which is given in the book but you feel that there is a lack of examples which could explain the impact of the long tail more effectively. But overall, its one of the few good books that are around which really force you to think unconventionally a worth buyi would say