Dateline BEA: Welcome to the Long Tail

One of the panels I was most anxious to check out here at BookExpo was Wired editor Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” presentation, which marked the transition from his original article to the expanded book. Because I’ve been following Anderson’s progress through his blog, I have to admit that a lot of this lecture sounded familiar, but I still took great comfort in the ideas that we shouldn’t confuse a limited distribution system with a culture’s shared taste and that abundance breeds variety. But in addition to talking about how to nurture niche markets, Anderson also discussed what it was like to write a book in public through his blog, and that was a great eye-opener in terms of laying out the necessity of owning and operating a meme and becoming the go-to source for people who want to talk about it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Anderson’s going to become the next Gladwell, maybe, but let’s put it this way: This is something people will be talking about this summer.

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