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Zeitgeist is a word mutuated from philosophy (Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit) meaning “the spirit of the age”, i.e. the set of fundamental paridigms of society/humanity in a given time.
Chris Anderson’s book “The Long Tail” contains such a fundamental paradigm that is a compelling reading to understand current Zeitgeist.

“The Long Tail” shows how the statistical distribution of sales in online services (such as Amazon, Rhapsody, iTunes, Netflix and others) differs from “traditional” mass retailers (such as Wal-Mart), i.e. “the combined value of the millions of items that only sell in small quantities equals or even exceeds the value of a handful of best-sellers”.
At the root of the phenomenon is the end (or the slack) of constraints such as the shelf space and the emergence of tools (e.g. recommendation engine) to filter out the massive quantity of goods at end of the tail.

The author mixes an useful historical analysis, an overview of the economic context (with a nice recap of how mass distribution usally works), and a deep grasp of hard data (being everything digitally recorded nowadys data is rather abudant) to convey a detailed understanding of the phenomenon at stake. The analysis of the main forces behind the Long Tail (democratization of the production tools, democratization of distribution tools and supply-demand connection) is crystal clear as the 98 percent rule and the “death” of Pareto rule.
The final prescriptions on how to pursue a Long Tail enabled business are rather brief but that goes far beyond the book’s sake. Despite the briefness the Long Tail rules are a fair and concise set of pragmatic advices.

The book has a plethora of further online resources:
- the author’s blog about the book: The Long Tail Blog
- an introducing article about The Long Tail, where the term has been coined.
- a comprehensive Wikipedia entry about The Long Tail.

Bottom-line: a highly recommended reading