Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The online economy offers challenges to traditional businesses as well as incredible opportunities. Chris Anderson makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can succeed best by giving away more than they charge for.

Known as "Freemium," this combination of free and paid is emerging as one of the most powerful digital business models. In Free , Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how it can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

In the twenty-first century, Free is more than just a promotional gimmick: It's a business strategy that is essential to a company's successful future.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (p. 1)
• 1 The Birth of Free (p. 7)
• What is Free?
• 2 Free 101: A Short Course on a Most Misunderstood Word (p. 17)
• 3 The History of Free: Zero, Lunch, and the Enemies of Capitalism (p. 34)
• 4 The Psychology of Free: It Feels Good. Too Good? (p. 55)
• Digital Free
• 5 Too Cheap to Matter: The Web's Lesson: When Something Halves in Price Each Year, Zero Is Inevitable (p. 75)
• 6 "Information Wants to be Free": The History of a Phrase That Defined the Digital Age (p. 94)
• 7 Competing with Free: Microsoft Learned How to Do It Over Decades, but Yahoo Had Just Months (p. 101)
• 8 De-Monetization: Google and the Birth of a Twenty-First-Century Economic Model (p. 119)
• 9 The New Media Models: Free Media Is Nothing New. What Is New Is the Expansion of That Model to Everything Else Online (p. 135)
• 10 How Big is the Free Economy? There's More to It Than Just Dollars and Cents (p. 162)
• Freeconomics and the Free World
• 11 Econ ooo: How a Century-old Joke Became the Law of Digital Economics (p. 171)
• 12 Nonmonetary Economies: Where Money Doesn't Rule, What Does? (p. 180)
• 13 Waste is (Sometimes) Good: The Best Way to Exploit Abundance Is to Relinquish Control (p. 190)
• 14 Free World: China and Brazil Are the Frontiers of Free. What Can We Learn from Them? (p. 199)
• 15 Imagining Abundance: Thought Experiments in "Post-Scarcity" Societies, from Science Fiction to Religion (p. 208)
• 16 "You Get What You Pay For": And Other Doubts About Free (p. 215)
• Coda: Free in a Time of Economic Crisis (p. 237)
• Free Rules: The Ten Principles of Abundance Thinking (p. 241)
• Freemium Tactics (p. 245)
• Fifty Business Models Built on Free (p. 251)
• Acknowledgments (p. 255)
• Index (p. 261)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

While the best things in life may be free, a business model based on giving stuff away seems a little crazy. But Anderson (editor in chief, Wired), who made a big splash with The Long Tail, tells us that this business model is already here. In The Long Tail, he showed how online businesses were making good by selling less of more, that is, by selling a huge range of niche or low-volume products that added up to big bucks. Here he demonstrates that the concept of making money by giving things away has already taken hold in the digital world. Verdict With explanations of basic economic principles like supply and demand and an analysis of the differences between products in the physical world and those in the digital world, Anderson makes the Free premise sound quite reasonable. Lots of companies are making lots of money from "free." Google and Yahoo, for instance, have some of the biggest computer server complexes in the world, yet they let us use their email, news, and search services every day. While this book may not be free, it will generate interest among both academic and general readers.-Carol J. Elsen, Univ. of Wisconsin, Whitewater (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users). New media models have allowed successes like Obama's campaign "billboards" on Xbox Live, Webkinz dolls and Radiohead's name-your-own-price experiment with its latest album. A generational and global shift is at play-those below 30 won't pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free, and in China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption-to the delight of artists and labels, who profit off free publicity through concerts and merchandising. Anderson provides a thorough overview of the history of pricing and commerce, the "mental transaction costs" that differentiate zero and any other price into two entirely different markets, the psychology of digital piracy and the open-source war between Microsoft and Linux. As in Anderson's previous book, the thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

In the prologue, the author states, "This was a fun book to write." Not as much can be said for reading it. Entertaining? Check. Insightful? Informative? Authoritative? No checks. Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail (2008), here posits that familiar business models and marketing schemes are, well, "so 20th century." The digital-Internet era has ushered in not just differences in degree but, more importantly, differences in kind because the cost of reaching vast new audiences is now approximately zero--or free. But his chapters and sidebars--how air travel, cars, silverware, music, textbooks, and education can be free--are deceptive and misleading. And his infatuation with psychology and distain for traditional economics--for which this economist reviewer would give him an F, as is free--allows him to be glib and to conclude the volume in the time-honored tradition of airport terminal business books with "Free Rules: The Ten Principles of Abundance Thinking" and "Fifty Business Models Built on Free." There is an index but no references; maybe they were not free. Summing Up: Optional. General readers and professionals. A. R. Sanderson University of Chicago