Chris Anderson's Blog

This blog is on hiatus, but you can follow me on Twitter and at DIY Drones, where I'm posting daily. I'll use this blog for occasional longer pieces that don't fit either of those two other spots.

For a recent speech to a travel company, we pulled together some data on the changing shape of travel due to low-cost carriers, online travel information and social-media driven word of mouth taking tourists beyond the usual top destinations. As in any industry that democratizes, you should see more diversity and the demand should be spread out over more "products". In this case, that this would be driven by:

This was one of those freaky moments when the future sneaks up and smacks you. I was on a plane earlier this week and took a break from work to watch the movie while they served dinner. It was Terminator Salvation, which once again tells us what happens when Skynet becomes self-aware and the machines take over. Then they cleared dinner, and I opened my laptop again and resumed work where I left off: programming unmanned aerial vehicles in RobotC.

Which is exactly, of course, how Skynet...

A team at Wharton did some Long Tail analysis on the Netflix ratings data the company released for its Netflix Prize. Although I don't agree with many of the conclusions in their paper (like some other academics, they got confused over definitions of "head" and "tail" and fell into the common trap of doing percentage analysis in an absolute numbers world), the data was interesting. They kindly shared it with me before publication and incorporated some of my analysis in their paper. But for...

If you checked out today's New York Times Book Review section, you'll see that FREE made the list in its first week of eligibility. It's #12, tied for #1 (that's what that little asterisk means).

We expect it to dip in its second week due to the free versions of the book cannibalizing sales, then stay strong longer than usual as the free offers expire and word of mouth from all the free readers turns into sales. So far in the first two weeks the book was downloaded, in one digital form or an

You can get FREE free on the Kindle (and Kindle iPhone app if you don't have a Kindle) now. It's been up for a few days and the free offer will end on Wed, Jul 22nd, so get it now.  As you can see from the above screenshot, it's already the #1 Kindle book. (US only, I'm afraid.)

The book is also available for free (for one month) on Shortcovers, where you can link to individual chapters and pages.

The free audiobook of FREE is now on iTunes, with some very nice front page promotion. Podcast serialized version coming up soon.

The Kindle version should be out later this week, along with some other ebook readers.

FREE is now available for free on Google Books, too. Like Scribd, this one is a web-based screen reading experience, but it has the added advantage of a live Table of Contents (see above), so you can easily get from chapter to chapter or pull up sidebars without having to page through the book.

Like the other free text versions, the Google Books one will be time-limted: one month. (The audiobook versions are the only ones that will remain free forever).

Next up, in the coming week: free FR

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

We're going to be rolling out the free digital forms of FREE over the next two weeks. First up: the Scribd form, right here on the blog (and anywhere else you want—it's embeddable). This is the whole book!

(click "full screen" for a better reading experience).

Also released today: the free unabridged audiobook. You can either download the whole things as zipped MP3 files, or play them on the Wired.com microsite.

FREE will be released in the US this week (July 7th in hardcover; July 9th in ebooks) and I'll be updating this blog with the various ways you can get it for free as they come online. But in the meantime, here's how we made the physical book free in the UK.

Above, you can see the UK hardcover on the right and a special sponsored paperback on the left.

Here's the description of the paperback give-away from Random House, the UK publisher, which will kick off at the end of the week.

Adobe