Free as a book choice in my Fall 09 Internet Marketing class

I heard about Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson while I was at SxSWi last spring. I'm a Chris Anderson fan and reference the Long Tail concept often in my classes, so I was intrigued as I heard Chris talk about his theory about pricing and how a service or product that is free might very well drive stronger profits for items that are connected to that service or product. His point that the three pillars of technology: storage, processing speed and connectivity speed are so abundant and so cheap that products and services that rely on those could change their whole pricing approach seems more than plausible to me.

Disclaimer -- I'm a Marketer NOT an Economist.

I decided that Free would fit in nicely into my supplemental book list for my Internet Marketing class.

Scheduling being what it is, I made that decision BEFORE I READ THE BOOK. The bookstore wants the Fall book list by the end of the spring semester so I went on faith.

It was the right decision.

First let me point out one of the highlights of my Internet Marketing class. All students are REQUIRED to read one book for the course: DigiMarketing: The Essential Guide to New Media and Digital Marketing (please don't judge the book by the website which suffers from GSNFI or gratuitous stupid non-relevant flash idiocy). This is the one book that actually works well for a course that is almost impossible to use a traditional text book for. Besides the content challenge of the course itself, many different majors take the course. It is required for Marketing and PR majors. Business majors who are interested in Marketing take it. I get some graphic design students (which I got more of these), an occasional web development student (more of them should take it too!) and International Business majors. Because of the disparate nature of the majors I came up with the idea to also have the students read a second book -- they would have a choice from a list of five that I provided -- all chosen based on their potential relevancy to the major so that students could gain a field perspective and context for why the Internet Marketing tools and techniques we are working with are important in their chosen field.

Free fits in well for Business and International Business majors. The economic emphasis along with the examples that Anderson provides and the breakdown of "how can ? be free" visuals really hits a home run...and Anderson does a great job of connecting all of this to the main topic of my course -- the Internet as a full-blown communication tool.

Overall I found the book an interesting read and one that brings forth a theory that I would like to see more explore. Great research for economists in higher education!

I am, however, disappointed in the approach both Anderson and his publisher took when it came to vetting sources and more importantly citing his sources. As the Virginia Quarterly Review pointed out in a June 23, 2009 post, Anderson did not appropriately cite his sources of historical information -- he used a lot of Wikipedia entries but didn't identify them as such nor cite the authors of the entries. While he did respond in a post and explain what occurred it is clearly an issue that I face in my classes all the time -- how do you accurately cite your sources? What are the different levels of plagiarism? How do you appropriately utilize community generated content information such as Wikipedia in research and information gathering? It's a challenge that will become even more difficult and one that has shown up here. Because of this I did think about pulling the book, however I have decided not to because the focus for me in the book is the theory that Anderson brings forth and his ideas around the impact of free pricing on products and services.

As even the author of the VQR blog post, Waldo Jaquith, wrote in response to comments:

While we’re on the topic of plagiarism in the form of ideas, I must note that I did not find any evidence that Chris Anderson’s thesis contained any plagiarized ideas. That’s an important point. All ideas that form of the core the book are credited, and his own thesis that he builds upon that showed no signs of being anybody’s but his own.

Hopefully other book authors and publishers will think about this issue, which can have a decidedly negative impact on the book, and not loose site of good editing practice in the rush to publish.

On a side note, Anderson made corrections to all the DIGITAL copies -- because he can. The hard copy editions won't have those corrections. Now isn't that an interesting dilemma that the digital age has brought us.

All my students have to write brief summary and analysis papers on the supplemental book they selected. I will look forward to reading their takes on Free.