FREE: Download Chris Anderson's new book 'Free', for free!
Why did you click on this particular blog post? Did you spot the legend ‘FREE’ and wonder what it was all about? Were you suspicious? Excited? How do you feel now?
Chris Anderson is the editor in Chief of Wired and famously coined the phrase and theory of ‘The Long Tail’, first in an article in Wired in 2004, and later in the 2006 book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.
Essentially he talked about companies like Amazon or the American Netflix and their niche approach to selling larger numbers of unique items, normally in small volumes at a time. The web enables this approach and the unique items can make up the bulk of sales and margin in many instances.
Currently the buzz surrounding Chris Anderson relates to his latest book: Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which while you can buy it from Amazon for £11.39 (discounted from £18.99) you can also download it for free from the Wired website or by simply clicking here the 285MB file will download to your computer! We like the free audio book version that can also be downloaded completely free, for not so much as a registration.
How brilliant is that for great public relations - hundreds of bloggers have already written about this and how good for Search Engine Optimisation that we have all merrily linked back to Wired and the download source?
The author reads his own book and is currently accompanying me on journeys of any significant length and it is proving a well researched and well placed read, achieving that clever blend of reinforcing stuff you know and educating you on stuff you didn’t.
For instance, we already know that our free resources are downloaded by many more people than register for our free newsletter ‘Creating Reputations’ even though those downloads are offered first to subscribers. We also know some of those have subsequently subscribed and a few have contacted us with a view to securing our services for their business.
So we get how free works in that sense and in the book Chris Anderson explains why, together with exploring so much more. I’d tell you more, but I am still listening!
So while I am indebted to Chris Anderson for his illustrative freebie, we can bring you another courtesy of Fora TV, which hosts a brilliant interview with Chris Anderson at The ALOUD Business Forum at Los Angeles Public Library.
The program, just shy of an hour, overlaps with the book, but it is really powerful to see the author explaining his conviction. They happily allow me to embed their video here knowing you are very likely to visit their website, which is crammed with such goodness.