Free : : the Future of a Radical Price

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Includes index.
The birth of free -- What is free? -- Free 101 : a short course on a most misunderstood word -- The history of free : zero, lunch, and the enemies of capitalism -- The psychology of free : it feels good. Too good? -- Digital free -- Too cheap to matter : the Web's lesson : when something halves in price each year, zero is inevitable -- "Information wants to be free" : the history of a phrase that defined the digital age -- Competing with free : Microsoft learned how to do it over decades, but Yahoo had just months -- De-monetization : Google and the birth of a twenty-first-century economic model -- The new media models : free media is nothing new. What is new is the expansion of that model to everything else online -- How big is the free economy? : there's more to it than just dollars and cents -- Freeconomics and the free world -- Econ 000 : how a century-old joke became the law of digital economics -- Nonmonetary economies : where money doesn't rule, what does? -- Waste is (sometimes) good : the best way to exploit abundance is to relinquish control -- Free world : China and Brazil are the frontiers of free. What can we learn from them? -- Imagining abundance : thought experiments in "post-scarcity" societies, from science fiction to religion -- "You get what you pay for" : and other doubts about free -- Coda : free in a time of economic crisis -- Free rules : the ten principles of abundance thinking -- Freemium tactics -- Fifty business models built on free.
Author Chris Anderson makes the compelling case that in many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Traditional economics operates under fundamental assumptions of scarcity--there's only so much oil, iron, and gold in the world. But the online economy is built upon three cornerstones: processing power, hard drive storage, and bandwidth--and the costs of all these elements 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. This is the engine behind the new Free, the one that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson explores this radical idea for the new economy, and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of both consumers and business alike.--From publisher description.

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