{"id":605,"date":"2009-07-23T20:08:54","date_gmt":"2009-07-24T00:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=605"},"modified":"2009-07-23T20:08:54","modified_gmt":"2009-07-24T00:08:54","slug":"free-the-future-of-a-radical-price-by-chris-andersonhyperion-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/free-the-future-of-a-radical-price-by-chris-andersonhyperion-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris AndersonHyperion, 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a free advance copy of this book via goodreads, and was excited to read it even after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s not-too-enthusiastic review<\/a> in the New Yorker<\/em>, and the plagiarism accusations in VQR<\/a> (which I got to via TeleRead<\/a>), and even Virginia Postrel’s review<\/a>, in which she calls Free<\/em> “a successful business speech between two covers, pleasant, upbeat and full of anecdotes and bullet points.” I’m not such a fan of business speeches, so maybe that description should have sent me walking the other way—but once I have a book in front of me, it’s hard for me not<\/em> to read it. So I read it, and you know, it wasn’t bad. <\/p>\n

Anderson writes about “Free” as a concept, rather than just free as a price: he claims, in the book’s prologue, that “twenty-first-century Free is different from twentieth-century Free”: it isn’t “just a marketing gimmick” intended to make us buy more (p 3). That was twentieth-century free, which was concerned with physical goods. Twenty-first-century free is more about the digital economy, which is one of the reasons it’s different. But it’s not entirely digital, and twentieth-century free hasn’t entirely gone away. According to Anderson, there are four ways in which things can be free: “simple cross-subsidy” (loss-leaders\/free samples\/all those familiar marketing gimmicks), ad-supported, “Freemium” (like Flickr: having a $25-a-year pro account lets me have more features, but the actual cost of those features, given digital economies of scale, is tiny: so I’m essentially subsidizing free users), and “nonmonetary markets” (like Freecycle) (p 30). <\/p>\n

There is lots of interesting stuff in this book about ideas like how economies work in an era of abundance, the different psychologies of “Free,” etc, and Anderson’s writing style is engaging, mostly. (I got annoyed by the repeated use of the phrase “triple play” to describe bandwidth, processors, and storage: he uses that phrase four times in different sections of the book!) But he sometimes skims over the costs associated with “Free,” environmental, moral, and otherwise. He talks about Zappos shoes and their free-shipping-both-ways policy, which lets you return shoes you end up not liking at no cost to you. But, well, as Anderson himself writes, there is cost there: among other things, there’s the fuel used shipping the shoes back, and that isn’t a cost without consequences. Does that affect the sustainability of “free” as a business model in the non-digital world? Maybe, but that’s not where Anderson’s focus is. He later talks about some of the negatives of “Free,” saying that “it can encourage gluttony, hoarding, thoughtless consumption, waste, guilt, and greed. We take stuff because it’s there, not necessarily because we want it” (p 67). But he’s more concerned with bandwidth and digital storage than with stuff per se, and seems to have faith that, as far as sustainability goes, we’ll figure it all out. <\/p>\n

The chapters toward the end of the book felt more like jumping from story to story (or, sometimes, tangent to tangent) than like a linear progression—China! Brazil! Different ideas about abundance in science fiction\/speculative fiction! The reputation economy!—but it’s all interesting enough that I didn’t too much mind. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got a free advance copy of this book via goodreads, and was excited to read it even after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s not-too-enthusiastic review in the New Yorker, and the plagiarism accusations in VQR (which I got to via TeleRead), and even Virginia Postrel’s review, in which she calls Free “a successful business speech between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}