Free: The Future of a Radical Price (edition 2009)

Anderson argues that with the electronic economy, it is sometimes effective to give away things and services in hopes of making money in other ways: selling support, selling similar things after viewers see the free things, selling advertisements, etc.

Contents: 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.