New ‘Free’ book by Chris Anderson to be released July 7
I’m really excited about the release of the new book by Chris Anderson, from The Long Tail blog, and plan to pre-order my copy soon. For those of you who don’t know, Chris has been leading the way in promoting ‘free’ as a new kind of business model. I advocate it here on this blog as well by encouraging and supporting authors who give away free ebooks to help promote a current title (for example).
The book is called Free: The Future of a Radical Price
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.
There are a lot of ways to use ‘free’ in your own business model, and doing so can actually increase your revenue. For those of you interested in ebooks, this might be the book to read, as ebooks make great free giveaways and can really boost your name recognition among readers. Who doesn’t love a free book?
The ‘Free’ book not without controversy
The controversy I’m referring to has nothing to do with it being about ‘free’ as a viable business model (although I’m sure such criticism does exist). I’m talking about recent accusations that Chris ripped off content from Wikipedia to be used in his book. As horrible as that sounds, there is much more to the story than that. Here’s Chris’ version of events:
In my drafts, 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. So at the 11th hour we decided to kill the notes and footnotes entirely and I integrated the attributions into the copy.
Basically, after ‘killing’ the notes and footnotes, Chris had to go through and manually redo the attributions. But when citing a source like Wikipedia, which has no one author, citations start to get tricky. He missed a few, which even Chris says is bad.
Having been through the rigors of college as an English Literature major and writing countless essays where every citation must be perfect (most professors are very vigilant at checking sources), I understand how things like this happen. The author gets into a rush to get the job done and ends up missing a few things. We’re all human and mistakes happen.
I’m giving Chris the benefit of the doubt here because I really don’t think he’d risk everything by blatantly ripping off a Wikipedia entry. Most college students wouldn’t even do that! So my opinion is that this is just an honest mistake and I hope it won’t take away from the valuable information in the book.
Promoting book without having read it
I usually try to link to and promote books that I read. In this case, however, I’m making an exception. You’ll notice that the Amazon ad to the right of this post is now showing Chris Anderson’s new book. Once I get my copy and read it, I will post a review here.
Once you read the book, feel free to post your own review in the comments section. I always love hearing what others think, even if they don’t agree with me.
Related posts
- How giving ebooks away for free increases print book sales
- Nook firmware 1.3 released – adds games, free ebooks & internet browsing
- Despite criticism, ‘free’ is very powerful
- What can we learn from a book pirate?
- Libre eBook Reader and Kobo eReader coming July 2 to a Borders near you
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