As an Audible subscriber I was able to download Anderson's latest Free: The Future of a Radical Price for zero dollars and zero cents (and 0 credits).
The same book in abridged format is $13.22 or 1 credit (as abridging is expensive).
On Amazon the price is $17.19.
Gladwell as a provocative (and I think somewhat wrong-headed) review in the New Yorker.
I'm sure we will have a lively discussion about where "free" and "open" come together. Many of us on campus have become big believers in giving away on the Web as much as what happens on campus as possible. We want to publish and share our lectures, our talks, our articles, dissertations, learning objects, data sets, training materials etc. etc.
Where ever you fall on Anderson's central thesis, you have to admire his willingness to put his money where his mouth is and give away the digital audio version for (about) the cost of the raw materials.
What are you waiting for....go and get your book!
Thanks, Josh. I just got it. Although, on my Audible site, both the abridged and unabridged versions are free. Here's to Anderson for practicing what he preaches
Posted by: Anthony Helm | July 07, 2009 at 12:35 PM
Chris almost lost me in Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity when he didn't know the difference between memory and storage. He did lose me when he didn't know the difference between file server and workstation storage.
The principle works, but he doesn't seem to have a strong grasp of how cheap things really are. Sure, you can spend $100 for 1TB SATA II hard drive for a desktop. Many servers don't use SATA, only SAS or iSCSI and so we'll need two drives at $400 a piece. Plus, this is shared storage where people put their important stuff, so we'll need to protect it with RAID, so we'll really need four drives. Don't forget backups in case there is a catastrophe. This cheap $100 for 1TB of storage is really $2,500.
Posted by: ez | July 07, 2009 at 02:18 PM
Chris Anderson is making the audio book available not just to Audible customers via the Wired website. Here’s the deal: you can get a universally free version over on Wired’s website. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/mf_freer
The zip file is at http://www.wired.com/images/multimedia/free/FREE_Audiobook_unabridged.zip
Posted by: Anthony Helm | July 10, 2009 at 08:38 AM