Free: The Future of a Radical Price »

Chris Anderson is the author of the international bestseller, The Long Tail. He is the editor in chief of Wired magazine and was a U.S. Business editor at The Economist. He began his career at the two premier science journals Science and Nature. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from George Washington University and studied Quantum Mechanics and Science Journalism at the University of California.

The New York Times bestselling author heralds the new future of business in Free.
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates thriving niche markets, allowing products and eager consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. In order to succeed in the twenty-first century economy, Free is more than a promotional gimmick: It's a business strategy that is essential to a company's successful future.

Traditional economics operates under fundamental assumptions of scarcity. After all, there's only so much oil, iron, and gold in the world. But what if the fundamentals of an economy aren't governed by constraints?

The growing online economy is built upon three cornerstones: processing power, hard drive storage, and bandwidth. The costs of all these elements are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10, and now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor-effectively too cheap to price).

Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. This is the engine behind the new Free, the one that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. In a world where prices always seem to go up, the cost of anything built on these three technologies will always go down. And keep going down, until they are as close to zero as possible.

In Free,Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new economy, and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of both consumers and business alike.

The Barnes & Noble Review

"The Future of a Radical Price," says the subtitle of Chris Anderson's Free. But for many readers unschooled in the preposterous paradoxes of the Internet economy, the idea of "free" as a financial price sounds ridiculous rather than radical, more comic than economic, closer to Monty Python's Flying Circus than to Adam Smith. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that Anderson begins Free with the hilariously stern public announcement made by the Monty Python team on the free video website YouTube in November last year. This note began in classically Monty Python tongue-in-cheek outrage:

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It's time for us to take matters into our own hands.

The logical response, of course, would have been for Monty Python to hire some killer lawyers and sue the pants off the kleptomaniac kids. But, as Anderson explains, "taking matters into our own hands" meant quite the reverse for the Monty Python team. Instead of building more secure walls around their content, Monty Python would post all their high-quality videos on YouTube. And it would all be free!