How free is free?

Don't we all recall The Long Tail? This saga of the real chance that we can all have a share? Eventually? If only we dip through the thousand years it takes to earn our two cents? The whole idea was born at Wired's Headquarters, by their chief wiring bloke, Señor Chris Anderson himself.

From the same keyboard stems the latest Anderson Buzz: Free - the future of a radical price. It's a whole book based on the reasoning line of just about everything being available electronically, thus stored on computers, these computers being perfect copying machines, copies actually not costing anything, and thus everything turning free.

Everything?

Maybe not. As at least some of the usual US American word artists claim. Most others complain. Grab your taste from Keven Kelly, Josh Kaufman, Malcom Gladwell, and of course Seth Godin.

As charming as the whole idea of free may seem at first, you'll basically see a repeating pattern: even free is paid for. Be it via subsidies, hidden costs, upgrades, or whatever else you may come up with by turning on your creativity.

Go and test it out yourself. Free is free in the sense that you don't have to pay for the download of the audio version of the book. You pay for it with your time and attention while you listen. It's lengthy at times, which immediately shows how free even this kind of free really is.

But maybe the tail of this tale is longer that it seems for now.