Gladwell begins with a recitation from the May U.S. Senate hearing on the newspaper industry, the one where David Simon spouted nonsense, and the one that has apparently become a sort of media Woodstock, dividing generations in the big ongoing publishing upheaval. Gladwell places himself firmly on the side of the oldies, and draws a tenuous parallel between the hearings and Anderson's book. Both apparently illustrate the stupidity of West Coast reefer hippies like Jeff Bezos and Arianna Huffington, who just hate selling content, or something.

In Gladwell's review, Anderson is constantly making imaginary pronouncements, which make him look like an idiot. He wants to turn the New York Times into Meals on Wheels, run entirely by volunteers! What a jerk. He says a free price is like "magic!" What?? And Anderson said nice things about YouTube, noted spectacular failure:

When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer... Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round down" [according to Anderson,] ...a recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.

Of course, Credit Suisse numbers may well be grossly overstated, and Gladwell doesn't mention that YouTube is expected to take in $241 million in revenue this year, twice one estimate of last year's sales.

Which isn't to say he's necessarily wrong about Anderson's book, or about Google's user-generated content being "crap." But it does show that, if you're looking for a long-term investment, a Free poster child like Google is probably a better place to park your cash than the magazine group where the two money-losingest titles have big fights over who has less of a grip on the future.

Anderson referred to a certain town as "Crescent City (New Orleans)," and the reference caught VQR's Waldo Jaquith, who was reviewing Free, off guard. As he told Fishbowl NY:

At first, I was thrown off. I thought that maybe that before it was called New Orleans it was called Crescent City and I was mad at myself for not knowing that.

But Wikipedia's entry for New Orleans only had Crescent City as a nickname, not as the original monicker for the town. So Jaquith ran a Google search using some of Anderson's specific language and — boom! — up came a Wikipedia article describing the origin of the term "Free Lunch," which Anderson had obviously copied from.

I figured that what had happened was that whoever had written it wanted to be cute and call it Crescent City, but also wanted to link to the New Orleans article [on Wikipedia]. So they put it in parentheses,

Then Jaquith remembered Anderson had once, in Free, weirdly put the word "currency" in quotes, so he ran that section through Google too, and found another chunk of text had been copied from the Web. The rest is history.

Anderson might be a plagiarist, but at least he has what poker players refer to as a "tell." And how appropriate, for the editor of Wired, that it's his reluctance to remove hyperlinks.

[Fishbowl NY]

(Pic by Pieter Baert)

Like so many plagiarists before him, Anderson claims his act was unintentional. The Virginia Quarterly Review first reported his copying, and the explanation he gave us is that he and his editors decided to kill Free's footnotes "at the 11th hour;" though much attribution was restored within the body text, Wikipedia sources were not. This was due, according to the statement he sent to VQR, to "my inability to find a good citation format for web sources (I resisted the time stamp proposal)."

The upshot: Print authors like Mike Pollan were cited for "intellectual debts" Anderson owed them, while many of the forward-thinking, freely-contributing writers Anderson champions in the book got no attribution. As it happens, this is violates the copyright license governing Wikipedia.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Like Maureen Dowd before him, Anderson promises to fix everything on the Web:

We'll have the original notes that were supposed to accompany the book, which includes all these, online by publication date

Update: Hyperion, Anderson's publisher, has gave a statement to VQR backing his mistake-not-plagiarism spin:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson's response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

More than anyone, Google popularized the notion that free websites could be supported by advertising, touching off the insane Web 2.0 boom that led self-promoting social media marketers to overrun San Francisco and drove venture capitalists into fits of expensive madness. If Google could give away its Web searches, why couldn't, say, Ploorkle monetize its users' ploonks?

Google didn't just serve as an example. It actively funded the free-everything boom with its AdSense ads, matching keyword buys from advertisers with every last blog and Web app.

The Google-spread delusion of "free" as the perfect price infected such lofty minds as Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired who penned first a cover story and now a book due out in July on the subject.

What does it mean for the freetards, then, that Google is starting to charge left and right?

The latest and most notable price hike came today on Google Checkout. The credit-card processing service for online merchants will soon match PayPal's fees, which run as high as 2.9 percent of a transaction.

When Checkout launched, it offered free processing for stores which spent heavily on Google ads, with the notion that free payments would lure vendors away from Amazon.com and eBay. Google is eliminating the AdWords discount, making Checkout just another PayPal clone.

Google has also raised prices on its once-free hosted computing services for startups which don't want to bother running their own servers.

The hikes have mostly hit Google's business customers. But how long before Google will raise prices for, say, extra Gmail storage? How long before it spackles ads on services previously kept pristine, as it's already done with Google News?

The advent of ads to Google News is notable. Just last summer, Google VP Marissa Mayer argued that Google News made $100 million a year from the Web search traffic the site generated, and therefore didn't need its own ads. Looks like she lost that battle with the green-eyeshades brigade. YouTube, too, is burying its videos in every imaginable form of advertising.

Google is widely expected to announce disastrously bad results for its first quarter. Industry trade groups have cut their forecasts for search advertising, Google's mainstay. Rumors of layoffs are sweeping Google's Mountain View campus. And even Google's Pollyanna CEO, Eric Schmidt, admits that the economic situation is dire.

Far more than a temporary belt-tightening, the cutbacks are a far-reaching change in mindset. It's no longer okay to invent something new and figure out how to pay for it later, as Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin once did. At today's Google, products must pay their own way, and with actual receipts, not business-model whiteboarding.

Who cares that that's not how Larry and Sergey did it? The billionaire founders are flying around the world somewhere on their private jets. The rest of Google has a business to run. And their paychecks don't come free.

The mag was indeed free (but not at newsstands). There have been some scattered reports of people walking out with them without paying. After the alarms went off, we hope they were advised about the web offer ;-)