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Malcolm Gladwell on Free
In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell (who appeared on the show late last year), the much-lauded author of best-selling books Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers, looks into the future of information. Or rather, the future of the price of information.
Using a new book by Chris Anderson called Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion; $26.99), Gladwell makes the case that while we hear time and again that “information wants to be free,” it is, and has always been, the purveyors of that information that decide what it wants and how much to charge for it.
Using the examples of Amazon.com, Apple, and YouTube, Anderson (by way of Gladwell) illustrates that charging for content is still the only way to be profitable online. (He compares YouTube's half a billion dollar yearly losses giving content away for free to Apple's booming business selling both hardware and content.)
You should really read the story for yourself, but essentially this is what it boils down to: While the cost of ideas and delivering them to inquiring minds has decreased radically, and continues to do so, it will never be absolutely free. And the difference between free and not free is a very big difference indeed.
It should also be noted that The New Yorker story is available online, free of charge, as is Anderson's book.