Free = Priced to Sell.
Found via @agletsmycat's Twitter: Malcolm Gladwell reviewing a Chris Anderson book.
That description should be enough to get half my family reading it. For everybody else, though, Chris Anderson is the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, which is about a phenomenon I've referred to in my previous blogs. It's all about how there are necessarily only a few "big winners" in most any field, but the implications of the internet and changes in how people shop for content and products means it's possible for those living within the "long tail" of a chart of demand can still make a living for themselves.
(See also what I've been saying about how the internet allows for more "modest successes" for authors than older models.)
His new book is intriguingly entitled Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
To quote Gladwell,
Anderson’s argument begins with a technological trend. The cost of the building blocks of all electronic activity-storage, processing, and bandwidth-has fallen so far that it is now approaching zero.
and
Anderson’s second point is that when prices hit zero extraordinary things happen.
The review goes on to cite some of the specific examples Anderson's book provided of the change in demand wrought by an offer of something free, but, really, that's one of the things that should be manifestly obvious. We've all experienced it. When something is free... especially when it's obviuosly well and truly free with no forms to fill out, no strings attached, and no requirements of personal information, we'll try things we'd never have otherwise given a second glance and pounce on things that would otherwise only have just barely piqued our curiosities.
I've spent so much time in the past few weeks talking to other authors (both directly and by proxy through my blog) and entreating them to be less miserly with free-ness, to be open and up front about any content they have that's free, to put it front and center and not hide it behind logins or anything else. As I put it to Matt Selznick in the comments on that io9 article, free can be the difference between a project that has legs and a project that has wings.
There is a colossal power in free product. You still have to figure out how to profit off it, but with the internet reducing overhead to an amount that approaches zero it doesn't have to be a huge profit, especially if you're a solo operator living in the long tail.
So, yeah, I will probably be checking this book out.
(And a tip o' the mitre to popelizbet for pointing me at the tweet.)
That description should be enough to get half my family reading it. For everybody else, though, Chris Anderson is the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, which is about a phenomenon I've referred to in my previous blogs. It's all about how there are necessarily only a few "big winners" in most any field, but the implications of the internet and changes in how people shop for content and products means it's possible for those living within the "long tail" of a chart of demand can still make a living for themselves.
(See also what I've been saying about how the internet allows for more "modest successes" for authors than older models.)
His new book is intriguingly entitled Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
To quote Gladwell,
Anderson’s argument begins with a technological trend. The cost of the building blocks of all electronic activity-storage, processing, and bandwidth-has fallen so far that it is now approaching zero.
and
Anderson’s second point is that when prices hit zero extraordinary things happen.
The review goes on to cite some of the specific examples Anderson's book provided of the change in demand wrought by an offer of something free, but, really, that's one of the things that should be manifestly obvious. We've all experienced it. When something is free... especially when it's obviuosly well and truly free with no forms to fill out, no strings attached, and no requirements of personal information, we'll try things we'd never have otherwise given a second glance and pounce on things that would otherwise only have just barely piqued our curiosities.
I've spent so much time in the past few weeks talking to other authors (both directly and by proxy through my blog) and entreating them to be less miserly with free-ness, to be open and up front about any content they have that's free, to put it front and center and not hide it behind logins or anything else. As I put it to Matt Selznick in the comments on that io9 article, free can be the difference between a project that has legs and a project that has wings.
There is a colossal power in free product. You still have to figure out how to profit off it, but with the internet reducing overhead to an amount that approaches zero it doesn't have to be a huge profit, especially if you're a solo operator living in the long tail.
So, yeah, I will probably be checking this book out.
(And a tip o' the mitre to popelizbet for pointing me at the tweet.)