Wired editor’s book on “Free” is free

Chris Anderson,  the editor of Wired magazine, has been debating with our columnist John Gapper the concept of free, after John reviewed his new book: Free – The Future of a Radical Price, published today by Hyperion.

Marketing of the book appears to be following Mr Anderson’s principles – it’s available free for the next month via the Scribd online document service. You can read it after the jump.

Scribd says this is the fully annotated version (with Wikipedia references) not currently available in print and it can be updated in less than a minute by the author.

It points out that this could be a future model for authors – giving away books for free and making money on  speaking tours, merchandising and movie deals.

Of course, offering free chapters online or whole books for a limited time or longer is nothing new, and the Scribd version cannot be easily transferred to an e-reader like Amazon’s Kindle.

So, in this particular example of free, having to read the 288-page work on a computer monitor is the actual price you have to pay.