I read Free for free on my Kindle. Anderson's put his argument (that giving something away for free can make you money) to the test, by offering free versions of his book for a limited time in a variety of digital forms. He also personally bought the rights to the audiobook, booked the studio time himself, and has made the audiobook free with no time limit.

It's a proposition that seems to have worked, since the book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and is still there (down into the 30s now).

His book is well worth the read.

Anderson argues persuasively that for years the cost of storing and transmitting information has been dropping, and dropping fast. The cost to host all of YouTube goes down in half every year, he argues, and since it's aiming toward the bottom, Google can afford to give it away for free.

The central attack on the book has been about free media. Free news cuts into paid newspapers, and–so the question goes–who is going to keep our government in check if the newspapers aren't out reporting?

But his argument about free is bigger than just media. There are countless businesses that need to be prepared to handle competing with free.

Cell phones offer free long distance, hurting the land-line providers.

Google Maps is free, and took away a market for paid maps (I love big pretty atlases, but a road atlas doesn't make as much sense when I have Google Maps on a phone or GPS in the car). As another side note, Google is being sued in France because it's giving away Google Maps for free and a competitor who wants to charge for a similar product is mad about it.

I pay bills online for free (now the post office is hurting).

One of the first things I did when I started at City Club was back up the files using SugarSync, which offers 2 gigs of backup … for free.

The list goes on.

The value for business is often because they see another market (ie, Google offers free 411 service because they want the voice data for their speech recognition software and possibly even translation services). Or the cost of giving away a product is so low, that they'll give away a "lite" version of it, hoping to get a small percentage to pay for the more robust version (ie, Flickr, Picnik, or a free version of an iPhone app). And sometimes a product is free because the company doesn't yet know how to charge for it, and believes that they can "monetize" the users later (Twitter, Facebook).

And then there's the other kind of free: collaboration. Wikipedia is free because 1 in every 10,000 visitors to the site makes an edit. An incredibly small percentage work together to craft encyclopedic articles that statistically speaking were as accurate as Brittanica. Linux is free because a group of programmers wanted a better, simpler, more stable operating system.

Anderson covers all these topics, plus discusses their implications for the consumer and for business. I really enjoyed this book, especially because I read it right when it came out. I read his book The Long Tail a few years after publication and while I enjoyed it, I also felt like it was dealing with some stuff I'd already figured out because it was 3 years old at the time.