Chris Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail.
His next book, FREE, will be published in 2009 by Hyperion.
click on this link for a taste of what’s to come…
its well worth it! http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all
The new model of free has emerged and is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast.
You know this freaky land of free as the Web. A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free versus pay online are ending.
In 2007 The New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. (The remaining fee-based parts, new owner Rupert Murdoch announced, will be “really special … and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.” This calls to mind one version of Stewart Brand’s original aphorism from 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.”)
