Rather than cater to the clamorers for Koontz, perhaps libraries should cultivate more long-tail usage. Perhaps some libraries, in an effort to boost circulation statistics, have focused too much on the "heady" end of their collections.In other words, many items in their collections have not been used since added. In fact, most large libraries have collections that extend far beyond the utmost limits of the longest tail. Any library stocking more than a few thousand titles (i.e., the vast majority of libraries) knows all about the long tail. Libraries were into long tails before long tails were cool.If it is true that long-tail business models have entered the mainstream world of commerce and are here to stay, what does this mean for libraries? If fuel and distribution costs in general continue to rise, that may be the Achilles heel of these long-tail businesses. In fact, courier systems may be to Amazon, eBay, NetFlix, and others what the coal and steel industries were to the automobile industry in the third quarter of the 20 th century. Efficient, effective, competitive courier systems are still essential to the early success of long-tail businesses. One fascinating thing about this first wave of long-tail businesses is that-although computer networks, search engines, Web browsers, and secure e-tailing systems have helped them achieve the first essential ingredient-order fulfillment usually still involves shipping physical items in boxes. The business must develop an easy, quick, and inexpensive means of order fulfillment.There must be a broadly experienced sense that millions of items are there for the picking, each equally available with just a few simple clicks of the mouse. The legion of customers must both perceive, and find, it easy to discover and experience items in the long tail.It seems to me that for a long-tail enterprise to succeed, at least two essential ingredients are needed: For example, the typical Wal-Mart stocks only a few thousand CD titles and probably only a few hundred book titles.Īnderson points out, however, that several innovative companies, such as Amazon, Netflix, and Rhapsody, have taken the long tail seriously and have discovered that anywhere from twenty-five to fifty percent of their total sales come from "taily" items when the long tail is well-groomed. Wal-Mart, which may have taken the traditional mode of retailing to its logical-some would say obscene-conclusion, fills its big-box stores with "heady" items. Because order-fulfillment and distribution costs were relatively high, it made more sense to focus on the small percentage of high-demand items than on the larger percentage of low-demand items. The long tail in a nutshell: when you give people hundreds of thousands or millions of choices-in books, music, movies, or other consumables-then create a graph, where the available choices are plotted (in descending order of popularity) on the X axis and the popularity of each item is plotted on the Y axis, the result is a rapidly declining, swooping line with a "long tail." In other words, a relatively small percentage of the available items will be very popular, but most of the items available will receive little use.įor years-decades, centuries-businesses focused on the head, not the long tail. His book on this topic was just published, appropriately titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Chris was discussing the " long tail" phenomenon in the new business-and-economics climate of the Internet age. By Tom Peters | On June 26 th I caught the tail end of Chris Anderson's standing-room-only talk in New Orleans during the ALA Annual Conference.
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