by JULIET WATERS

I recently moved and there are things I love about my new neighbourhood, and things I miss about my old one. There’s a great dog run, where my pooch has plenty of open space to chase balls, a fab water fountain and a vast selection of dogs to sniff. But I really miss my old video store.

It wasn’t a chain, but it was big. Two floors with a great repertory selection and a large fleet of smart employees who rarely seemed to change. They didn’t have endless copies of recent releases, but that just encouraged people to browse the old movies. They did have that stubborn policy against putting English titles in the computer. So there was that time, when I first joined, that it took me a week to find Curb Your Enthusiasm (Cache ta joie.) Eventually, however, I figured out how to find what I needed, and so did everyone else, since this place was always hopping. Walking in there, I never once felt like an urban loner nurturing my solitary, quirky cultural life.

Now my closest video store is the local Blockbuster, and if Chris Anderson ever needs dramatic proof for The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, he should film an average night there. It’s a ghost store. Granted, it’s at the edge of Parc Ex, where the demand for Bollywood far exceeds Hollywood, but compared to what I’m used to, this place is just sad. It’s stuffed with recent hits, but these are recent hits that nobody seems to want.

Statistics support this trend. Hits in film and music just don’t bring in the profits they used to. Amazon and iTunes both report that they now make as much, if not more, from the sum total of products that sell only a few copies, than they do from the sum total of the best-seller. Anderson illustrates this with a graphic that basically looks like—well—a graph. The vertical line represents the hits, what he calls “the short head.” The horizontal line represents the rest. If you distribute mostly through the Internet, this line is infinite, and so your profits are only limited to the amount of warehouse space you can buy up.

The Long Tail is the future of business, according to Anderson, but that doesn’t mean the short head will ever disappear. People will always need and want the hits as cultural reference points, if nothing else, but it’s unlikely they will ever dominate the cultural landscape in the same way they used to.

Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired, so needless to say, this is all good. It’s a business model created and maintained by technological advances that can mean nothing but happy, democratic days for us all. While there may be huge advantages for artists and cultural consumers from this model, Anderson ignores even the possibility that there could be a dark side. There’s no mention, for instance, of some weird work practices that are coming under increasing scrutiny. Maintaining the long tail seems to involve a lot of computer sweatshop work, cataloguing tasks that are mindless, but need human brainpower. Work that Amazon is reportedly paying pennies a task for. The political dogs that have bitten into Wal-Mart—the king of big warehouse selling—seem to be sniffing around the cyber marts too.

For that reason, I buy that the long tail is part of the future of business, but I don’t buy that it’s the future. And I wouldn’t want to buy it. Hopefully the future of business will be filled with consumers who have a wide range of criteria for where they buy from, not just what they buy. Some will always prefer local to international, some will always prefer the human to the cyber touch. It’s just a gut feeling, but the new neighbourhood of business, I think, will probably be like my local dog park. A lot of different tails, long, short and on a good day, mostly wagging.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Hyperion, hc, 238pp, $24.95