“Here is what Chris Anderson means by ‘Free’: If you want to know what he really thinks, you’re going to have to pay for more than his book. He acknowledges that he is giving his book away online so he can be hired for much more lucrative speaking and consulting jobs. He is sufficiently crass, reckless and lazy to have had someone else read the science-fiction books he uses to illustrate the perils of scarcity and abundance. […] ‘The way to compete with Free is to move past the abundance to find the adjacent scarcity,’ he writes. And ‘Free’ is full of specific examples of how to do just that. But after beating the drum for giveaways throughout most of his book, Mr. Anderson eventually acknowledges that his idea is in fact not viable.”

— Janet Maslin of the NYTimes reviews Free in hilarious fashion