Review of: Free, the Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
On the one hand, I feel horrible writing this because I understand first-hand how much time and effort it takes to write anything from a blog, to a magazine article to a book. On the other hand I’m never going to get the time back that I spent reading this book. Being a fan of Wired magazine I set the bar high and waited with anticipation until Chris Anderson (Wired’s editor) released his new book “Free, the Future of a Radical Price.”
The bar I set was far too high.
Chris Anderson is a gifted writer in the new-web-economy sense of confusing the generation of lists with actual analysis. The content of the first 240 pages (hardback book edition) are familiar to anyone who has followed the history of both technology, economics and business for the last few decades. Good summaries are freely available with much more detail and some actual analysis at the free www.wikipedia.org website. For those who haven’t followed the history or prefer a briefing, consider purchasing his book when it comes out in paperback or via Amazon’s Kindle. Perhaps this is the intended audience for the majority of Chris book.
Where is the value in this book?
The final 13 pages (hardback book edition) consist of a summary list of the lists in the previous 240 pages. Sadly, no “aha” moments. The business models listed in this book are well-known.
Chris does mention in his book that he makes a fair amount of money through speaking engagements. Perhaps he is following one of his listed strategies of giving folks a “taste” of his work with the hope that 5-10% of the readers of Free will hire him for a much higher paying speaking gig? If this is his intent, then he needs to refer to page 247 of his own book where he spends 1 1/2 pages discussing a critical issue: Pricing conversion rates. Mostly a list of what companies like Club Penguin, Habbo, RuneScape, Puzzle Pirates, and Intuit (TurboTax) have accomplished, he is right on the money with the underlying theme of how much information do you give a way to 95 people in order to get 5 people to purchase an actual product. Something that he calls the “Freemium” pricing model.
I actually paid for the hard cover book, read it and then requested a quote from Chris’ booking agent on the cost to book Chris for an event. Perhaps at a high paying event, Chris would actually provide us with in-depth analysis and hands-on information from his own start-up ventures (he mentions several in the book but gives little detail and no analysis).
The cost to book Chris for a speaking engagement is in the tens-of-thousands of dollars range.
Frankly, the leap of faith required to pay Chris for an event in the hope that he’ll provide the audience (including me) with much higher value analysis is too high. He didn’t get the equation right for his book. A list does not constitute highly value added analysis. Perhaps if he provided an example on in depth analysis in his book, I’d be willing to make the leap of faith. But I’m not buying it based on the value of his book in both the price I paid for it as well as the one limited resource that I expended: My time invested in reading his book.
Lessons Learned
1) While I like working with lists to accomplish a whole slew of things, lists are not in-depth analysis. Regurgitation of information is best left to a computer. It’s simple and very cheap (practically free).
2) In this day and age, it’s important to provide actually value to a client with a basic product in order to have the opportunity to up-sell them (what Chris calls the Freemium business model). This book left me very frustrated.
Bottom Line
Like a song that you want to hear only once (a personal one-hit-wonder) but one that has no long-term relevance within your music collection, most of us would check out the song for free in snippet form on iTunes or in full on Youtube or Playlist.com. This applies to Chris’ book. Read or listen to the free versions but don’t spend your time, or more importantly your money, on his book.
Free versions of Free
Free excerpts and a free, truncated audiobook are available through Wired magazine www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free and www.hyperionbooks.com/free respectively.
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