FREE: The Future of a Radical Price

By: Chris Anderson

Narrated by: Chris Anderson

The New York Times best-selling author heralds the future of business in Free. In his revolutionary best seller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that, in many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them.

Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival. The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long.

Just think that in 1961 a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor - effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage. Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy.

Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.

In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

©2009 Chris Anderson (P)2009 Hyperion

Critic reviews

"As in Anderson's previous book, the thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating." ( Publishers Weekly)

Worth the price...kidding! Good listen.

The concept of FREE is important for today and tomorrow. I enjoy business stories more than business theories. He provides lots of stories around the basic premise. It does not slow down like so many business books. Yes, I would have paid for it.

old news used before

Right: businesses charge premium rates to some and promote with free products

Interesting..

Very interesting ideas. Makes you stop and think about all the "free" things we take for granted.

A Radical View

Anderson talks about the price model and the changes within the model. This is a well written book with real examples from real companies. The music industry can learn from this book. With the advances of technology, business models must adopt to take advantage of the new technologies, as well as not get left behind using old models.

Interesting

It is interesting. Well worth the price of free! As well as the time it took to listen.

Very informative and Free too

This book offers some excellent marketing strategy ideas. I found the reader rather enthusiastic which added to the pleasure of this book.

Free: the future of radical price...was FREE!

This was actually a great book. Its amazing that companies can be built on the idea of giving everything away for free. But really nothing is free.

This book while free to me was probably paid for by some internet company probably Google. The book should be called how Google gives everything away for free and became the largest company in human history.

As I write this. The information I provide is collected and sold to companies. They now know a little bit more about my likes and dislikes. That knowledge while worthless to most people, is collected on the internet and sold. Google is the largest information collection agency in the world. Amazing that billions and billions of dollars are made each year from the "1`s" and "0`s" collected on the internet.

Nothing is free, but if you don't mind having some of your information out there, its probably not a big deal. The alternative is that your information is still out there, short of living off the grid. So enjoy what ever you can and careful because nothing is truly free.

Business around FREE

A clear and comprehensive analysis of the business of FREE. How the market forces drive the price of digital goods to free.

Free is cool!

I wasn't expecting much but was extremely surprised at the amount of really useful information.

Worth every penny

A great walk through the correlation of price and value and how what we assume to be true is not always the case. Intended (in my opinion) for the casual economist, hungry entrepreneur, and curious business mind.