When a book becomes a phenomenon out of the gate in the way that Chris Anderson‘s THE LONG TAIL appears to be, then detractors show up wanting desperately to debunk. One is the WSJ’s Lee Gomes, who takes aim at most, if not all, of the book’s main points. “In the book’s main sections, Anderson writes that as things move online, sales of misses will increase — so much so that they can equal or exceed the sales of hits. The latter is the book’s showstopper proposition; it’s mentioned twice on the book’s jacket,” he says. “I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn’t have any examples of this actually occurring.”
Except, as Anderson fires back on his blog, they are – and Gomes is missing the point. “What [the book] does say is that the current data at Rhapsody, Netflix and Amazon show that the tail amounts to between 21% and 40% of the market, with the head accounting for the rest. hich is why the language Gomes cites from the book jacket is actually all phrased in the future conditional tense.”