Culture
A Niche in the Long Tail
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Last week I was walking past the Salvation Army store on my corner, when I noticed that someone had abandoned a box of books in front of the deposit bin. I assume that things left there are for perusal, so I perused, and found a book I’d always been curious about: Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”. Andersen writes about how things change when scarcity of access is no longer a factor in what we purchase. He looks at books and music in particular, and at the changes that have occurred in our consumption of those media, now that we have unlimited choices of what to read or listen to. A half century ago, my reading source was my school or town library, and what they had was the limits of what I might read next.