Review: 'Free' advice on how to profit by giving things away
— -- You can shell out nearly 30 bucks for Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, or you can download the audiobook for free from publisher Hyperion's website or at LongTail.com. It's available on Scribd, Google Books, Shortcovers and iTunes. All free, for varying lengths of time.
At the Hyperion site, you'll need to provide your e-mail address so it can send you information about its "other great books." The hope is that by giving you Free free, you'll become a paying customer for upcoming books.
Anderson skillfully makes the case that free is a business strategy here to stay and that increasingly, businesses will profit more from giving things away than by charging for them. "This new form of Free is based on the economics of bits, not atoms. It is a unique quality of the digital age that once something becomes software, it inevitably becomes free — in cost, certainly, and often in price."
In Free, he explores the evolution of the free economy, its various forms, how it works in industries from software to publishing to retailing, and where it's headed. He persistently drills home the point that "free" isn't just a marketing gimmick, such as the age-old game of offering free samples to lure in consumers.
Anderson kicks off his book with a dollop of free-marketing history — the tale of jiggly Jell-O gelatin. Invented in the late 1800s, it was "too foreign a food and too unknown a brand for turn-of-the-century consumers."
In 1902, the owner of the business tried something new by running a small ad in Ladies' Home Journal touting Jell-O as "America's Most Famous Dessert" and printed a cookbook with recipes using Jell-O, then had traveling salesmen hand it out for free door-to-door in small towns across America. Armed with the recipes and the notion that it was a famous dessert, consumers began to ask for Jell-O, and sales rocketed.
Another reference from the past is "free lunch," which sprang up in the 1870s as saloon owners began offering free food to customers who purchased one drink. The bet: They would buy more than one drink and fill the saloon during a less busy time of the day, Anderson explains.
