Everyone quotes Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog, “information wants to be cheap” but Dumenco recalls the whole quote, which summarizes where we stand in journalism and the media business today.

Here’s the whole thing that Brand said at the first the first Hackers’ Conference about 25 years ago. “Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless, wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”

Thus, you will get a free netbook, with a paid subscription to an online info service. The Detroit Free Press and e-book producer Plastic Logic will announce a model like this in 2009 or early 2010.

via How the $0 Netbook Might Just Help Save the Media Industry – Advertising Age – The Media Guy.

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