FREE: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson looks at what happens to businesses and business models as more and more goods and services are offered for free. He explains how it’s possible for businesses to give away their core product and looks at the economics of FREE.

Chris Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine having moved there from The Economist. He is also the the author of the book The Long Tail.  His reputation has been tarnished by accusations of plagiarism relating to FREE: The Future Of A Radical Price. A shame as the core ideas are useful, but as I have to carefully reference all my MBA assignments I’m not all that sympathetic to his excuse:

…I had intended to blockquote Wikipedia passages, footnoting their URL. But my publisher, like many others, was uncomfortable with the changing nature of Wikipedia, and wanted me to timestamp each URL (something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Anderson page viewed on July 8th, 2008), which struck me as clumsy and archaic…

Sure I’d agree it’s not a particularly pretty way to reference, but it’s a widely accepted standard. Furthermore failing to attribute is also a breach of the Wikipedia License.

Despite all that it’s a fascinating book filled with anecdotes that illustrate the point. I found them entertaining and inspiring and the story of the gym offering free membership inspired my recent post Starting A Gym – How To Profit By Offering Free Gym Membership. The last few chapters are a useful summary:

• Free Rules: The ten principles of abundance thinking – provides ten rules for thinking about free in terms of abundance.
• Freemium Tactics: Finding a freemium model that works for you – looks at how you can apply the freemium business model to your business.
• Fifty Business Models Built On Free – provides a list of 50 business models built on free, split into three categories:
  • Direct cross subsidies;
  • Three party markets;
  • Freemium.

If you run a business, are responsible for sales and marketing within a business or are an future entrepreneur you should buy this book. After reading it you’ll either be inspired to try offering your product for free or confident that you can compete with anyone offering your product for free.

You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon USA.

Subscribe:
If you enjoyed this post and would like to be kept updated on future posts, then please Subscribe by Email or subscribe to my RSS Feed.