FREE, the latest book from Chris Anderson, is now available for free in Scribd.com, Audible.com, direct mp3 download (courtesy to Wired.com), Google Books, and seemingly more to come. The no-cost download of the book is an experiment of Chris’s own research and theory about the “freemium” business model, which is to make your products and services freely available to everybody, while trying to get revenue from other indirect means such as advertisement, premium pro accounts, and many other creative ways.

First, I want to relate this concept of giving away free items to the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. In his book, namely at Chapter 3 – The Cost of Zero Cost, and Chapter 13 – Beer and Free Lunches, Dan illustrated some interesting researches on human psychology and behavior towards free products and services.

• the experience of getting free things is pleasurable.
• there is less sense of lost ties to free things. We don’t feel sorry for abandoning them after using it for a while, or even not used them at all.
• even if the free items are not completely satisfying, we tend to forgive and keep using it.

Also, as illustrated in Chris Anderson’s another book The Long Tail and many other similar books that describe the new Internet business ecology, we know that:

• the cost of maintaining atoms, which physical products and services, is relatively higher
• the cost of maintaining electronic bits and bytes, such as online banking services, book store, music store…etc, is getting cheaper and cheaper, at a rate of getting about halved every year. For example, the cost of maintaining Youtube at 2010 will be half as much as 2009.
• the technique of offering products by scarcity is not ideal nowadays. With the advancement of digital storage, commercial tools and internet technology, we can serve a large amount of products digitally with abundance. We can serve niche markets without the concern of shelf space, physical storage, logistic cost and so on.

It will be fun to see how the traditional media reacts to this. Will they freak out? Will they accept and adopt the model? Will they try hard to resist the trend of openness and free, even though more and more evidence shows that it is inevitable?

Another interesting thought about the free release of FREE is translation. As a participant of TED open translation project, I am very interested to see, that how this free availability of the book would trigger a wave of internationalization, in an unimaginable speed and near-professional quality. Inspired by a post in The Global Voices Online – “Japan: ‘Yoshiharu Habu and Modern Shogi’, an Open Translation Project” published in May, is it possible to reproduce the same voluntary translation movement?

Resources mentioned in this post:

• About Chris Anderson
• FREE on Scribd.com (unfortunately, not accessible from Canada as for July 13, 2009)
• FREE on Audible.com
• FREE direct mp3 download (courtesy to Wired.com)
• FREE on Google Book
• Predictably Irrational
• Dan Ariely
• The Long Tail
• “Japan: ‘Yoshiharu Habu and Modern Shogi’, an Open Translation Project” from Global Voices Online

Chris Anderson (Wiki), the author of Long Tail, has released his new book “FREE” on scribd.com in an electronic book format. You can read the full book at the comfort of your personal computer.

Here is the the customer experience for sampling/buying a book:

• First, you must phone or check online to see if the closest bookstore carries the book. If they do not, you must request them to order some for you, and then wait for days until they call you back to notify you that the 5 copies are now available, and that you can only hold it for 48 hours until they sell it to someone else.
• If they otherwise carry the book in store, you must immediately drive to the store and get it. Speaking of driving, I hope you are not too concern about the gas price, traffic jam and carbon footprint, since it is quite some overhead to travel for a distance to get a stack of paper bound together.
• If you want to first read a few chapters of the book to see if it’s really your thing, you will have to either stand next to the shelves, sit on the floor or bring own foldable chair to sit on for hours. Keep in mind that there are only few copies of the book, so people may want to just buy the one you’re reading now. By the way, the store closes at 8pm.

Now with the newer Amazon model:

• You can “Look Inside”, sample the table of content and a few random pages that are not connected and hardly making sense. At the time I write this post, Amazon still hasn’t open the “Look Inside” feature for this book.
• You can still pre-order the book online, so when the book is available, Amazon will ship it to your house. Still, I don’t really like the overhead of carbon footprint and stuff, but I’m cool with that.
• Sure, they have Kindle (which is not available in Canada) that can take away those tree chopping, printing and logistic stuffs, but still you cannot sample the full book just like you could in the bookstore.

Now with full book viewing on Scribd.com:

• 24/7 reading at your personal computer: no store hours, standing by the bookshelves and angry eyes on your back for keeping the book too long.
• Sample the book as much as you want, since it is fully available to you. Not just the table of content and a few random pages.
• Immediate purchasing in PDF so you can load it into other reader gadgets of choice.

This free, full book reviewing concept is still not very popular in main stream publishing industry, but I am really looking forward to see some smart publisher, who gets it and understand that the value of the “free” is so powerful and manipulative.

You can learn more about Chris Anderson on his website at http://www.longtail.com.