The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.

In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.

The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.

In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

Visit Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Free Audiobook Download Page

You can either download the whole things as zipped MP3 files, or play them on the Wired.com microsite.

THE BIRTH OF FREE
There’s no getting around it: Gelatin comes from flesh and bones. It’s the translucent, glutinous substance that skims to the top when you boil meat. But if you collect enough of it and purify it, adding color and fl avor, it becomes something else: Jell- O. A clean powder in a packet, far removed from its abattoir origins of marrow and connective tissue.

We don’t think much about the origins of Jell- O today, but in the late 1800s, if you wanted to put a jiggly treat on your dinner table, you had to make it the hard way: putting off- cuts in a stewpot and waiting a half day for the hydrolyzed collagen to emerge from the gristle.

In 1895, Pearle Wait sat at his kitchen table poking at a bowl of gelatin. The carpenter with a side business of patent medicine packaging had been wanting to get into the then- new packaged foods business and thought this might be the stuff, if only he could fi gure out how to make it more appealing. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Anderson is the author of the international bestseller The Long Tail. He is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and was a U.S. business editor at The Economist. He began his career at the two premier science journals Science and Nature. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from George Washington University and studied Quantum Mechanics and Science Journalism at the University of California.

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