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Unleashing the Ideavirus
Nonfiction e-Book-of-the-Month, August 2000. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR of Permission Marketing, and founder of Yoyodyne - the Internet direct marketer acquired by Yahoo in 1998 - Seth Godin is the man BusinessWeek named "the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age". With the release of Unleashing the Ideavirus, Godin lives up to his revolutionary reputation by becoming the first bestselling author to release a book in its entirety online, for free. According to Godin: "The Web is all about taking things to extremes. Don't just offer cheap e-mail, make it free. Don't just offer cheap music, make it free. I decided to push the limit and offer my book for free. The Internet does for entrepreneurs what radio did for records." Just as giving away songs on the radio makes musicians more money, giving away ideas online makes them more valuable. Available as a PDF file on Godin's ideavirus website, and featured as the cover article in Fast Company's August issue, Unleashing the Ideavirus is also available from AOL, in a Peanut Press edition, and a special Express Reader edition from Qvadis for Palm-based devices. Unleashing the Ideavirus is a manifesto that says that in the new economy, ideas that spread fastest win. Its core message is that the best ideas act like viruses, and become contagious. And, contrary to the thesis of traditional marketing, which shapes and controls the dissemination of product information from business to customer, Godin suggests that, instead, information spreads most effectively from customer to customer. Furthermore, the marketer's role is not to market, but to prepare both the "ideavirus" and an environment most conducive for that idea to replicate and spread. It's a challenging thesis, made even more thought-provoking by the fact that the e-book itself is an ideavirus. And by making the entire book available online, Godin has both set a new standard for successful authors, and challenged the current economics of book publishing and marketing.
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