Review of Chris Anderson's New Book - "Free"

Chris Anderson's new book "Free: The future of a radical price" is a great read. Who knew that the business around providing Free services would be at least $300 billion a year! I read the complete book for free in 3 days flat.

So how do I repay Chris for his service? I blog and I twitter, which compels more people to read and some to even - yes, that's right - buy! That's the magic of providing a free service. You give your stuff for free and you get a bigger audience and more recognition for free. You may not get $$ right now, but you get something more important - reputation and influence that can yield far more monetary returns later than the immediate sales of a book. That's the message of the book.

Not that Chris needs my help in any way - he is a legend already. The point is that this strategy can help any obscure individual or company with a compelling idea or product to reach huge audiences with little or no cost.

Free is the force that is powering through the web and demolishing everything in its wake. Chris provides reassurance to authors, musicians, and businesses everywhere that are touched by the digital revolution that there is hope. Yes, the market price of anything that can be digitized will go to zero - like it or not. You better build high value services around your free product if you want to stay in business. He provides examples of 50 companies that have done so, and so it is not impossible.

To survive and succeed, one must migrate to "abundance thinking" instead of "scarcity thinking". The internet is making anything that can be digitized abundant. He provides the ten principles of abundance thinking that are crucial to evolving a strategy in your specific area of business. The most important of all is that "Every abundance creates a new scarcity". Discovering what that new scarcity is and migrating there is what will make your business profitable.

As an entrepreneur looking for practical ideas and concrete steps on using this business model, it fell short. Granted, there is no one recipe that fits all. However, a detailed case study of an internet startup that struggled until it discovered a practical way to use the Free business model would have been interesting.

I am sure the business models with Free will evolve over time and there will be more articles on the net. To track these articles in a coherent and shareable form, I have created a Mashedge web guide titled Business Models Based on Free. It's work-in-progress, if you know of any great links to add to the guide, please do let me know.

As an aside, aspiring authors can use Mashedge to collect links to online articles as a web guide in preparation for their book. They can share the web guide with their assistants to help with online research and be more productive.