Free disposal

This one is for the Department of anomalous pricing (like this one). Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, is about how things should be Free. The physical book isn’t free but some electronic ones are (e.g., here). As for the audiobook, the 6 hour unabridged version is free but the 3 hour abridged version is $7.95! That is not only not free but the whole pricing scheme seems to violate the usual economic assumption of free disposal. Talk about challenging basic assumptions.

5 thoughts on “Free disposal”

  1. Apparently the other way to read it free is to look up the Wikipedia articles it was allegedly plagiarised from.

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  2. Cheap shot, Jacques. I believe he was accused of lifting several explanations or definitions from Wikipedia, but not the central arguments.
    And Joshua, those Audible editions are not available here, I guess for copyright reasons. That aside, I highly recommend Audible for boring runs or gym workouts or long plain flights or (this from my daughter) breast feeding in the middle of the night.

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  3. Yeah – I use Audible quite a lot and am always irritated to get the We are not authorized to sell this item to your geographic location. Reponse that I just got then!

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  4. The same “we can’t sell it to Australians” rubbish is frequently happening with ebooks now too.
    You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard for the Australian rights holder to just get a cut whenever the audio/ebook was sold to an Australian.

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  5. Hmm, where is the “free” download option? Oh I see, Its locked down to the Scribd service, so its free but not with much freedom.
    Although a few pundits are seggesting the ebook version will be free to download soon.

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