Do you remember The Long Tail?
The title of a book from 2006 by Wired editor Chris Anderson, in which he claimed that "the economy of the future is about selling less of more".
Above all, this was assumed to apply in culture and the media.
The long tail was the shape of the sales curves of the future: a hump at launch and then an after-sale that never ends.
The narrower a book or movie or record is, the better the idea was, the more certain sales will never end.
The mass market of the future would be a myriad of nerd markets, as all these long tails together would become more valuable than the few best-selling products hunted in the 20th century.
The term and the vision were loved by all kinds of niche geeks who thought it sounded like heaven that the focus would now shift from the wide to the narrow.
The age of the hit was over, said Chris Anderson.
But the digital age is
full of failed prophecies and over time, The Long Tail has increasingly ended up there: another leg rank in the desert alongside the "infobahn".
There is too little money in the long tails, and they require too much work.
They are most in the way of the highly efficient competition which, on the other hand, has proved to be perhaps the most significant feature of the digital age.
In a blood-curdling article in Svensk Bokhandel, the publisher Göran Dahlman describes how entrance after entrance to the market has been closed to his pytteförlag (25 titles in 20 years) Kärret.
Local bookstores are dying.
Chain bookstores are switching to central purchasing only.
Libraries are switching to central purchasing only.
And now finally: the country's largest online store gets tired of dealing with small publishers cardboard for cardboard and invoice for invoice.
Purchase a professional distribution service or even disappear from our marketplace.
Adlibris is more than three times as large as the market runner-up Bokus.
Only fifteen
years ago, it was thought that the digital marketplace would have developed into something wide-open, a free idyll with no boundaries or thresholds to speak of. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the digital marketplace is characterized by extreme competition and that the market manager - Adlibris, Amazon - is gaining more and more power to look after its own interests.