The Long Tail explains why the new internet era means comsuming less of more and why the 80/20 rule doesn’t hold for a lot of goods distributed through the web. The forming of the long tail is dependant on three (3) conditions:

• the democratization of tools: e.g. the blogging tools made personal publishing easy and affordable for a lot of individuals;
• the emergence of internet: the internet makes marginal  cost for storagenegligible and dramatically decreased the distribution cost;
• the filtering capability provided by search engines: the search engines made it possible for web consumers to find what matters to them efficiently and effortlessly. When there is an easy way to separating the wheat from the chaff, we become less concerned with the mounting chaff.

The question to me seems like which tool I would like to democratize most if I still have the chance…   

One thing really cool in China is that some books can be bought at half the price or even cheaper than in the book stores in US. The book I am currently reading is Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. I bought it at Rmb 98 (about $13) at Shanghai Book City, while oreilly.com sells it at $34.95 online.

This is a classic elasticity case. The publisher wants to maximize its profit by selling as many books as possible. To achieve this goal, the publisher prices each book differently based on the elasticity (the purchasing power) of each market. The more inelastic (insensitive) the demand curve is (against the price change), the higher the price the consumers are going to pay. For publishers, as long as each book sells above its marginal cost, the publishers make money. However, this model only works if the consumers in less elastic market have no access to the same goods sold much cheaper elsewhere. Otherwise, the more expensive books will never sell.

Thanks for the internet and the modern means of transportation, consumers are much more powerful to reach goods sold worldwide than in, say, 60’s or 70’s in the last century. So, students could always go to amazon.com.uk to buy text books to save 20 to 30 bucks for the exactly the same books and people like me can buy the exactly the same book in book stores in China for half the price or even cheaper.

Books I am reading now. Reviews at http://www.slashdot.com/.