Currently I'm listening to Chris Anderson reading his new book called Free. And as you would expect, the audio book is free (as in beer). Funny enough, there is another, abridged (!) version available at audible.com that sells for $7.49. Why?

Because, as the Audible.com listing explains,"Get the point in half the time! In this abridged edition, the author handpicked the most important and engaging chapters and points, cutting three hours from the length without losing key concepts. Time is money!"

In another attempt to do what he preaches, Chris has also released the complete ebook on Scribd (embedded below) and Google Books (the latter only in the US). Now there are no excuses left for not reading (or listening to) his latest book. If you prefer a shorter introduction to the topic, you may want to start with Chris' Wired essay published last year. Chris Anderson, for those who don't know the man, is editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail.

In his latest book titled Remix, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig outlined the potential he sees in a new Hybrid Economy -- one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies.

That future will benefit both commerce and community. If the lawyers could get out of the way, it could be a future we could celebrate.

What Lessig calls "sharing economy" is more or less what we call Share Economy. Two weeks ago, Lessig gave a talk at Trendtag where he explained his vision for a remix culture no longer restricted by outdated copyright law. Definitely worth watching.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote an intriguing piece dubbed The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity for the latest issue of Wired. Which brings me to the question: Is what we call Share Economy more or less the same animal as Anderson's New New Economy?

As you may remember, Kevin Kelly published his best-selling book New Rules for the New Economy back in 1998. While some believed this book belonged to the trash bin after the 2000-2001 burst of the dot-com bubble, it brings in fact a lot of still valid insights. Kevin Kelly now goes a lot further when he writes about The New Socialism, as he did for Wired.

At next09, there have been a lot of post-marxist reminiscences, one observer noted. Anderson and Kelly now provide us with the background story.

This crisis is not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era. We will come out not just wiser but different.

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it's the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.' No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

Take Detroit. The only way for the Big Three to survive, Charles C. Mann writes in "Beyond Detroit", is to harness the innovation of the myriad startups working on automotive technology.

Or take Google. As Steven Levy explores in "The Secrets of Googlenomics", the company deploys a bottom-up model for ad sales, dictated not by firm handshakes but by hard math.

Or even society at large. A century ago, mass collective action could be organized only by the state. Now we have the Web. Kevin Kelly resurrects socialism--without the state--in "The New Socialism".

To all the usual reasons why small companies have an advantage, from nimbleness to risk-taking, add these new ones: The rise of cloud computing means that young firms no longer have to buy their own IT equipment, which helps them avoid having to raise money or take on debt. Likewise, the webification of the supply chain in many industries, from electronics to apparel, means that even the tiniest companies can now order globally, just like the giants.

Chris Anderson: The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity
Kevin Kelly: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

A prominent success story of the Share Economy is Apple's iPhone App Store. It has enabled droves of developers to share their work with iPhone users while getting rewarded for it. But why did it take a newcomer like Apple to implement this simple but powerful business model? A recent Reuters story nails it:

"As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it's a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry," said Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecoms consultant Northstream.

"Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that has never done it before," Nordstrom said.