Every idea has to begin some­where. And, back in 2000, Seth Godin start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with a fair­ly rad­i­cal pub­lish­ing mod­el. Inspired by Mal­colm Glad­well, Godin wrote Unleash­ing the Ideav­irus, which essen­tial­ly argued that free ideas spread quick­er than ideas that cost mon­ey. And it’s the ideas that spread the quick­est that win. So what was the log­i­cal next step? Mak­ing the book avail­able for free (get the ebook here) and see­ing what hap­pened.

The video above tells you the rest of the sto­ry. What it does­n’t tell you is that Godin has since writ­ten a steady stream of best­sellers (find free ecopies here), while author­ing the most wide­ly-read mar­ket­ing blog and found­ing Squidoo. The art­work accom­pa­ny­ing God­in’s talk was cre­at­ed by Stu­art Lang­field.

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Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Mar­cus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copy­ing, which makes the case that “copy­ing is an essen­tial part of being human, that the abil­i­ty to copy is wor­thy of cel­e­bra­tion, and that, with­out rec­og­niz­ing how inte­gral copy­ing is to being human, we can­not under­stand our­selves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, jour­nal­ist and Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in the Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture depart­ment at York Uni­ver­si­ty, Toron­to. You can down­load a free copy of his book in PDF for­mat straight from this link. (Note that the text is for­mal­ly released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.) Or you can always pur­chase a print­ed copy online.

P.S. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press is offer­ing up a free e‑book of its own: The Bour­geois Virtues (632 pages) by Deirdre N. McCloskey. Head here to get a copy.