In his more annoying moments he comes across as delightedly plugging his buddies at Amazon.com and Raphsody, in his more interesting he has his readers questioning why they would even consider going to a real-world store again. Chris Anderson's The Long Tail comes as no surprise for anyone who has immersed themselves in the world of blogs and Web 2.0 hype. If you, like me, fall into this category will find his explanation of the new structure of Web-driven business...well...old business.

It is this very fact - that his observations are already old in their native territory - that perfectly describes the specific environment. Any blogger will know that the freshness of your writing is of utmost importance, anything over 72 hours old is well past its prime and will not receive much attention. Books, then, are in an awkward position to be providing cultural critique for a subject that partially defines itself on a rapid pace of change. Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig are among those who have already began to experiment with the medium and I'm surprised The Long Tail did not follow in their footsteps. Yet, while Anderson focuses on books to a great degree in his text, he deals with them entirely as commodities and seems to have overlooked the role of the medium's role as cultural dialogue.

Perhaps this is the central point that troubled me about The Long Tail. It is a thorough business analysis (at least as far as this untrained writer can tell) but it is an utter failure in critically examining the cultural importance of these phenomena. Yes, the fact that masses of consumers are now able to tag mechandise will result in greater sales, but this fact changes more than entrepreneurs' incomes - it changes the fundamental interaction between individuals, others, commodities, and themselves.

I found myself asking why he bothered to publish this book when it, to me, said nothing new. Anderson sent this book out to bloggers - in exchange for a review - to build up buzz presumably, but he should have sent it out to the editors of small local newspapers, to start-up indie labels, to that gift shop I live above at the moment. These are the people who would most benefit from reading The Long Tail - not bloggers. We already know this stuff, we already have been reading the Long Tail blog and throwing around the term for months.

Bloggers have already taken advantage of the filter and aggregation techniques he details to find his work; we all would have bought it, or read it, eventually anyway - even though we're moving on. He should have targeted other segments of our larger society's long tail. The ones that this book was written for anyway.