Charles on… anything that comes along

(Yes, I could be telling you all about Australia and New Zealand - where I am just now - but that’ll come later. Anyhow.)

It seems the Long Tail©™® so beloved of Chris Anderson at Wired isn’t quite so long or tail-y after all. Here, he recants. A bit.

Let him tell it:

One of the most quoted statistics in my original article was the data point that 57% of Amazon’s book sales are in the Long Tail, defined as beyond the 100,000 books available in the typical Barnes and Noble superstore (we sometimes used 130,000, which is the inventory of its larger stores).

But it turns out that Amazon’s ranking numbers are notoriously unreliable:

we were told that Amazon’s sale rank algorithms were, well, notoriously funky; indeed, they apparently showed hysteresis at certain points, jumping backward thousands of rank steps when certain sales thresholds are crossed. Finally, Amazon sources suggested that the MIT methodology may have undercounted Head (top 100) sales, leading to an overcount of the Tail.

I can certainly vouch for that: watching the wife’s novels leap up and down the rankings is enough to persuade one that it’s very volatile between 1,000 and 10,000. And there was a famous New Yorker article (anyone got the link?) where the writer simply picked a very obscure book and kept on buying one or two copies a day through Amazon to see what happened to the ranking. It leapt about.

Anderson again:

Subsequently, I had the chance to speak with Jeff Bezos about the figure, and although he didn’t know the exact number, he also thought ours was very high. He guessed it was closer to the 20% range, in line with the other examples. In October, I posted on the debate here.

Which leads to the finale:

..research with aggressive assumptions puts the Long Tail (titles beyond the top 100,000) at 36% of Amazon’s book sales. Conservative assumptions, meanwhile, put it under 20%. Cross-checking it against Amazon’s book revenues seems to suggest something in the mid-to-high twenties. In either case, it’s certainly less than 57% and even 39%. But the Long Tail still appears to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of Amazon’s book business, which is a significant fraction by any measure.

His emphasis with the bold quotes.

Well, it’s quite a comedown for the digital age. It turns out that all those dreams of the superniche online world have turned to dust, shattered by some more careful work using the back of a larger envelope. Tch. Pity.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• "Tails are cool" (26 October 2005; score: 66.47%)
• More statistical syllogisms (21 August 2004; score: 59.19%)
• The long tail, best gadgets for Xmas, and how a Canadian island may foretell the fate of the Amazon (1 December 2004; score: 46.89%)

The discussion about what happens (if anything) “after” the iPod is taken up in The Guardian’s Online section. (Thanks for the mention, people.) It’s a pretty straight report of what was said at the Musictank event, though far more did get said than could get squeezed into such a small space.

And (rather late in telling you all), I wrote about the coming of HDTV to the UK for The Independent. Unfortunately it’s now gone behind the paywall, but the general gist is that you might as well wait. Although Sky has announced both its plans to have HDTV channels and an HD Sky+ box and an HD decoder (the latter two won’t be free upgrades..), there’s nothing clearly announced from Freeview or the BBC.

That means that for now having a high-definition TV is really only useful if you buy or rent a DVD made for widescreen. The general point about HD being that the extra pixels on the screen are really used to widen the screen so it takes up more of your visual field, which gives you a more immersive experience.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Moving to Linux; and self-amputating superendowed spiders (25 August 2004; score: 24.4%)
• Gillian McKeith, white courtesy phone please (30 September 2004; score: 22%)
• What's the future of photography? (18 November 2005; score: 19.81%)