Friday Book Review: Free - The Future Of A Radical Price

I was a fan of Chris Anderson's last book The Long Tail so I was eagerly awaiting his latest effort Free: The Future Of A Radical Price. Luckily my waiting was rewarded by Audible as they offered a free download of the audio book.

Free started as a February 2008 post on Wired. Mr. Anderson spent the better part of a year researching the book which makes the flap about his failed attribution of sections of the book to Wikipedia even more ironic.

Sadly this doesn't seem to be the only place where content has been cribbed from other sources in order to pad out the book. To my count, parts of the following books are discussed in Free:

• Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
• The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
• New Rules For The New Economy by Kevin Kelly
• The World Is Flat by Thomas L Friedman
• Freakonomics by Malcolm Gladwell
• The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
• Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
• Animal Farm by George Orwell

I agree with the basic premise of Free but I really didn't learn anything new by reading this book. Which is funny as I think my demographic would be the target audience for it. I guess it may be a different experience if you haven't already read the above books but if you have you can easily take a pass on Free.