
The World is Flat, and now it's free?! That's right, a la Chris Andersen, from July 25th through August 4th, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Macmillan Audio will be offering the audio edition of Thomas Friedman's THE WORLD IS FLAT for free. Listeners will receive the audiobook in three easy-to-download sections, and soon after that, as an added bonus, will also receive an exclusive prepublication audio excerpt of Friedman's HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: WHY WE NEED A GREEN REVOLUTION AND HOW IT CAN RENEW AMERICA. The book itself will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 8th.
Want it? Go here. Quickly. In our experience free stuff doesn't stay free for long.
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Comments
Thanks for the tip. I do highly recommend this book.
By the way, why is this free now?
friedman is windbag that has been wrong so many times about so many things its hard to keep track. thats why its free.
the best review of this book can be found here:
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
It seems Friedman is using it to promote his upcoming book. Giving away books for free doesn't hurt sales as much as people think. The concept is that while some sales are lost as people who would purchase the book received a free copy, the word of mouth marketing and promotion created by the free copy produces a net INCREASE of sales.
For example, "The World Is Flat" was published three years ago and is currently available from Amazon in paperback for $10. Arguably most of the people who were going to purchase it have already done so. Therefore the cost of lost sales is minimized. In exchange for this, people are tempted to purchase his latest book for $20.
In another example, Seth Godin, a marketer, claims that the key to success in knowledge based fields is to get your ideas into as many minds as possible. He has offered free PDF versions of his books online and claims to have benefited from it.