Table of Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition xi
Prologue 1
1 The Birth of Free 7
What Is Free?
2 Free 101 17
A Short Course on a Most Misunderstood Word
3 The History of Free 34
Zero, Lunch, and the Enemies of Capitalism
4 The Psychology of Free 55
It Feels Good. Too Good?
Digital Free
5 Too Cheap to Matter 75
The Web's Lesson: When Something Halves in Price Each Year, Zero Is Inevitable
6 "Information Wants to be Free" 94
The History of a Phrase That Defined the Digital Age
7 Competing with Free 101
Microsoft Learned How to Do It Over Decades, but Yahoo Had Just Months
8 De-Monetization 119
Google and the Birth of a Twenty-First-Century Economic Model
9 The New Media Models 135
Free Media Is Nothing New. What Is New Is the Expansion of That Model to Everything Else Online.
10 How Big is the Free Economy? 162
There's More to It than Just Dollars and Cents
Freeconomics and the Free World
11 Econ 000 171
How a Century-old Joke Became the Law of Digital Economics
12 Nonmonetary Economies 180
Where Money Doesn't Rule, What Does?
13 Waste is (Sometimes) Good 190
The Best Way to Exploit Abundance Is to Relinquish Control
14 Free World 199
China and Brazil Are the Frontiers of Free
What Can We Learn from Them?
15 Imagining Abundance 208
Thought Experiments in "Post-Scarcity" Societies, from Science Fiction to Religion
16 "You Get What You Pay For" 215
And Other Doubts About Free
Coda 237
Free in a Time of Economic Crisis
Free Rules 241
The Ten Principles of Abundance Thinking
Freemium Tactics 245
Fifty Business Models Built on Free 251
Notes 255
Acknowledgments 263
Index 269