Free, like all business books, works except where it doesn’t

I haven’t been following Chris Anderson’s work too closely.  I read (and enjoyed) The Long Tail, and I caught his intro piece on Free in Wired a while back, but I don’t read his blog regularly and most of the news I get these days comes from Twitter, which skews differently on any given day.

What I’ve caught so far, and I’m sure there are more sides to the story, is that data’s starting to come out that challenges the Long Tail theory, and today I see what appears to be some backpedalling on the Free concept.

I’m not trying to critique either of his theories here.  To me, this all falls into the “here are some examples of how a concept works except where it doesn’t” style of business books, and there are a lot of them out there.  You know what?  That’s OK.

I didn’t learn a single thing about the Long Tail from the book.  I got some new words for my vocabulary so I could better communicate ideas around the concept, and I found out a bit about how retail works.  It was worth the however many hours and dollars the book took from me.  I’m sure Free will give me similar value.

I think, in this business ADD environment, there’s a market for a new kind of self made guru: all you need to do is queue up your books for the next cycle.  Start writing a book today about how businesses ran things 2 years ago.  In 2 years, do it again.  I figure after about six years you’ll have established a pipeline that you can start publishing, with minimal editing, every two years for the rest of your life.  It’s the whole what was old is new again thing.

Business books serve two purposes for me: one is to get that vocabulary up and running, as mentioned, so I can frame new ideas and discussions in a way that people will understand under the meme/zeitgeist of the moment, and the second is to put my brain in a trance-like state from which related ideas will come out.

From that, if someone wants to churn out 200 pages on how digital oranges are going to take over the new wave of RFID wikis, I’m going to save myself the effort of deciding at the checkout and just buy the damned thing without worrying too much about whether or not I’m getting scammed. I’ll find a way to make it worth my while.