Free - or not

I read a couple of reviews of Chris Anderson's book on the new business models on the web, "Free - the future of a radical price", and found it to be intriguing. So intriguing in fact that I wanted to have a closer look at it, and possibly even buy it. The review mentioned that the book was, true to it's content, available for free on the web.

So I googled it, and found that it was indeed available for free at Scribd, but wait...

Are you freakin' kidding me? The book is arguing that trying to protect your intellectual property with various kinds of annoying restrictions is not a very good idea in this new economy, yet it's actually utilizing the very same, ridiculous techniques as the rest of the entertainment industry, providing the consumers with a sub-quality product (who wants to read a 274 page book online, with no option for saving or downloading???) and the infamous and hysterically annoying geographical restrictions found on DVD's and several streaming video sites, to mention a couple. Makes me wonder if Chris Andersson's publisher, Random House, has even read the book they're publishing, or if it's all just a bad joke.

Granted, you can download the sound book version in MP3 format here, but who wants to listen to a book for seven hours? Where's the damn PDF?

Needless to say, I'm not contributing to Chris Andersson's and Random House's "radical economy".