Free.

So I finally got around to finishing Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. If you haven’t sat down with it, do so. Soon. It’s available for, ahem, free at your library.
Anderson’s main points can be summed up here:
* If it can be made digital, it will trend towards being free.
* You can’t stop free through laws or technological barriers. Take note, music industry.
* Sooner or later, unless your line of business is completely local and non-digitizable (is that a
word?), you will have to compete with free.
* Manage for abundance, not scarcity.
* Free makes other things more valuable — every abundance creates its own scarcity. Find the
scarcity.
* Traditional economics of scarcity just don’t apply to the digital economy of bandwidth,
computer processing power and hard drive storage.

As I’ve been a public librarian for the past decade or so, I’ve been keenly interested in this trend toward free. Libraries (in our current form) have been in the game of providing free content for a couple centuries so this comes as no surprise that people like stuff that is free. But up until now, libraries had a monopoly on free. But the interwebs have given us some pretty stiff competition and, at the same time, increased the relevance and value of libraries even more. What with the massive deluge of information that is currently available (but oh so, so, so poorly organized), libraries have no shortage of work ahead of us. With every abundance comes a scarcity, no? I hope I’m not being a Polly Anna here, but I believe that the library’s access to high-quality, well organized and authoritative information sources puts us smack in the middle of what is scarce in the “Information Age.”