Reddit reviews Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing

Michael Lewis has some great titles, with Liar's Poker being my favourite finance-related book of all time. Malcolm Gladwell is another good author, but that's more behavioural economics then high finance. Some stand alone titles:

- Intelligent Investor, Ben Graham

- Free, Chris Anderson

- Persuasion, Arlene Dickinson (Dragon's Den)

- Decisions, Jim Treliving (Dragon's Den)

Not surprising, given the multiple studies showing that piracy boosts music revenue. Or the anecdotal evidence that Game of Thrones paid viewership keeps continuing to go up, even as it keeps breaking its own record for most pirated TV program ever.

I highly recommend reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. (Which is, appropriately, free as an Audible download.) It shows how freemium is a perfectly viable business model for most digital things.

1. Natural Capitalism - Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Most businesses still operate according to a world view that hasn't changed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Then, natural resources were abundant and labor was the limiting factor of production. But now, there's a surplus of people, while natural capital natural resources and the ecological systems that provide vital life-support services is scarce and relatively expensive. In this groundbreaking blueprint for a new economy, three leading business visionaries explain how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution.
   
   
2. The Information Diet. The modern human animal spends upwards of 11 hours out of every 24 in a state of constant consumption. Not eating, but gorging on information ceaselessly spewed from the screens and speakers we hold dear. We're all battling a storm of distractions, buffeted with notifications and tempted by tasty tidbits of information. And just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness.
   
   
3. Republic, Lost. With heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic - and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left - Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system.
   
   
4. Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing. A generational and global shift is at play—those below 30 won't pay for information, knowing it will be available somewhere for free, and in China, piracy accounts for about 95% of music consumption. Anderson provides a thorough overview of the history of pricing and commerce, the mental transaction costs that differentiate zero and any other price into two entirely different markets, the psychology of digital piracy and the open-source war between Microsoft and Linux. Although Chris Anderson puts forward an intriguing argument in this cheerful, optimistic book, many critics remained unconvinced.

Well sometimes things actually are free, someone's just hoping you'll buy stuff later. If you have not I recommend you read this book https://www.amazon.com/Free-Smartest-Businesses-Something-Nothing/dp/B0043RT912

It is extremely interesting. It's about the practice of giving away things for free to encourage stronger customer relations and sales in the future. Examples include bands putting their music up online for free, games being "free to play," etc.