Chris Anderson

Free or not free?

Chris Anderson's new book Free is available for free as a download to Kindle. But the hardbound edition costs $24.95. Not free. His thesis is that no matter what content providers think about it, free digital copies of content are going to win out. It falls apart in some areas of his model, but we do need to examine what the concept of free is going to mean for us. We fall on this side of the free divide - we do our work before people bundle it off to try and make money with their content and our indexes. Or we provide the access to huge bodies of information that must be accessed. But will digital free mean that we lose customers, because they are cutting the costs of making things so close to free?

By the way, Anderson's book has an index. It is inactive in the kindle edition. I would love to write to him and let him know that for $50, Joshua Tallent could have kindlized it for him.

Jonathan Fields has more about hoping all things won't be free.