Giving it away

Chris Anderson’s Free makes a case for
gratis but is it all it’s cracked up to be?

by JULIET WATERS

I read Chris Anderson’s latest book for free. Normally this isn’t news. As a book critic, I get a lot of books for free. But because Anderson decided to accompany the hardcover launch of Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price with various free digital versions (at his Web site thelongtail.com) I thought it would be interesting to experience the book the same way a reader who wanted to read it for free would.

For a few days, I had quite the Chris Anderson Sensurround experience. I flipped through the book on Scribd, online software that allows you to look at the book without actually being able to download it. Like most people, I find reading long works online awkward. And I especially hate the fact that I couldn’t copy, highlight or mark pages. I had to go old school, take notes and write down page numbers. Ugh.

But I loved that I could listen to the book in audio while doing housework. Free is the perfect audio book: anecdotal, provocative, easy to absorb, but not so complex that I couldn’t get right back into it if I missed anything I couldn’t hear over the vacuum. And anyways, whatever I missed I could go back and re-read in the print version, right? I did worry that having Chris Anderson in every nook and cranny of my brain this week might bias me somewhat. But isn’t this a good example of the value of free as a marketing tool?

My bias has now, however, shifted. Because when I set to work to write this review, with my handy notes, the digitalized Scribd version was gone. Apparently Anderson didn’t check with the Canadian publisher, who paid him for distribution rights, how they would feel about his giving the book away for free. So all I saw was a message telling me that this book was not available in this form in my country.

I suppose at this point I’m supposed to blame Canada. But I don’t. Because this experience clued me in, immediately, to what was missing in this book. Free is full of fascinating factoids about the advantages of giving things away for free. And about how to mix free products with premium products, so that wealthy consumers are paying for the production of things that can be given free to average consumers. It would be unfair to say that Anderson has nothing to say about the dangers of free to the business community. He’s got plenty in here to back up the last sentence of the book: “Free may be the best price, but it can’t be the only one.”

But there’s not much in here about negative experiences of free from the consumer’s point of view: the computer that becomes unworkably slow as it fills itself to the gills with free apps and their endless updates, and the energy it takes to learn the latest new networking software that everyone’s using. Last year Facebook. This year Twitter. Every year some new free app comes along and takes over our lives, the way we communicate with other people, the way we listen to music and, increasingly, the way we read. Next year, who knows how we’re going to scramble to adapt to the machines that increasingly rule our lives with the chaotic appearance and disappearance of free stuff.

As Anderson points out, entire countries are now dependent on free. Brazil runs on free Linux software. Which is great as long as some other open source giant doesn’t do Linux under.

Yes, free is radical. The question is, should it be? I think the essentials of life should and can be free. And high quality, relevant information is one of those essential things. But it needs to be free in a way that is sustainable and dependable. Otherwise it’s just free at the service of somebody’s profit margin, and not in the service of actual freedom.

FREE: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF A
RADICAL PRICE BY CHRIS ANDERSON,
HYPERION, HC, 288 PP., $34.99