Free : the future of a radical price / Chris Anderson

What's free? -- Free 101 : a short course on a most misunderstood word -- The history of "free" : zero, lunch and the enemies of capitalism -- The psychology of free : it feels good. Too good? -- Too cheap to matter : when something halves in price each year, zero is inevitable -- "Information wants to be free" : the history of a phrase that defined the digital age -- Competing with free : Microsoft learned how to do it over decades, but Yahoo had just months -- De-monitization : Google and the birth of a 21st century economic model -- The new media models : free media is nothing new. -- What is new is the expansion of that model to everything else -- How big is the free economy? : There's more to it than just dollars and cents -- Waste is (sometimes) good : the best way to exploit abundance is to relinquish control -- Econ 000 : how a century-old joke became the law of digital economics -- "You get what you pay for" : and other doubts about free -- Non-monetary economies : where money doesn't rule, what does? -- Free world : China and Brazil are the frontiers of free. What can we learn from them? -- Imagining abundance : science fiction as a thought experiment in "post-scarcity" societies -- Coda -- Free rules -- The 10 principles of abundance thinking

Author Chris Anderson makes the compelling case that in many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Traditional economics operates under fundamental assumptions of scarcity--there's only so much oil, iron, and gold in the world. But the online economy is built upon three cornerstones: processing power, hard drive storage, and bandwidth--and the costs of all these elements are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. 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. 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.-- From publisher description