I’ve recently started reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s book Free: as in speech and beer, which I’m enjoying a great deal — and it’s one of those books that really gets you thinking differently about a variety of things. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction:
This is not a techno-anarchist manifesto advocating the destruction of the copyright system as we know it. As entertaining as that might be, this is a book for grownups.
This is not a starry-eyed paean to the wonders of e-business, nor is it a smug, self-congratulatory dismissal of the possibilities of dot-coms.
This book is an executive summary about the fraught relationship that networked society has to one word — FREE.
The book is a fascinating exploration of how ‘free’ really means different things to different people, and how we often confuse the two very different meanings of the word. There’s also quite a bit in there about the future of information and knowledge sharing on the web.
On a side note, one of my favourite quotes from the book:
Jason McCabe Calacanis, the editor and CEO of Silicon Alley Reporter, finally said the unsayable late in 2000, calling banner ads ‘an absolute, complete, unmitigated failure,’ and lamenting that ‘we standardized a failed concept. That’s how stupid we are in the Internet industry.’
If you’re interested, you can read the book for free online (or if you want to be old-school, buy a paper copy of the book
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August 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Fascinating! Thanks for pointing out this book, Lucas. I think I’ll have to give it a read. Free always intrigues me. Nothing motivates people quite like giving them something for free. But it can also make them feel like they’re getting something that’s worthless. Odd dichotomy.
August 25th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I think you’ll enjoy it — it’s quite an interesting read.
That’s also a really good point about the ‘worthlessness’ of anything that’s free (and is talked about quite a bit in the book). Funny how the value of something increases as its perceived scarcity increases — even though in terms of the electronic world, such scarcity’s often self-imposed. I think you might have given me a post idea.
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:36 am
Hmm, I need to read this book. I’m, a big believer in selling more through creating the idea of scarcity, but I also work with the concept that if you give something away for free you have to use this as a strategy to generate value elsewhere – a bit like writing a free e-book and letting it circulate around the web with links in it back to your website – a strategy like that can be worth its weight in gold.