No true Scotsman, and all... Books are no different than media in general: there was an article posted earlier today on HN about how there are simply too many TV shows right now, and at the same time new shows have to compete with every other great TV show that people might not have watched yet.<p>Media has finally evolved to the point where the long tail is starting to become the market. This has interesting implications on consumption patterns, though what we&#x27;re seeing is that the long tail is increasingly served by a single company: YouTube for video (excluding &quot;head&quot; or &quot;neck&quot; content on cable&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;etc), Amazon for books, Steam for games, etc. This points to discovery and market access being a problem: people don&#x27;t look for the long tail elsewhere because the draw of the long tail is selection, and only one store&#x2F;site can boast the best selection of obscure content.<p>Where does this go? I have no idea, honestly. Media is incredibly interesting right now because of that. I don&#x27;t know if the long tail effect is good or bad for society, but we&#x27;re seeing it play out in a lot of weird ways right now (Trump&#x27;s campaign, the awakening that the police may shoot a lot more innocent people than we realized, etc). Polarization (which can be thought of as drifting into the long tail of less-popular ideas) is happening, but it&#x27;s happening irregularly throughout society without much of a discernible pattern.