Back to results
Cover image for book Information Wants to Be Shared

Information Wants to Be Shared

By:Joshua Gans
Publisher:Harvard Business Review Press
eText ISBN:9781422190470
Edition:0
Format:Reflowable

eBook Features

Instant Access

Purchase and read your book immediately

Read Offline

Access your eTextbook anytime and anywhere

Study Tools

Built-in study tools like highlights and more

Read Aloud

Listen and follow along as Bookshelf reads to you

Stewart Brand famously declared, “Information wants to be free.” Except he didn’t (not really). And it doesn’t.

Information is much more complicated than that. What information really wants—what makes it more valuable, useful, and immediate, Joshua Gans argues—is to be shared.

Using the tools and logic of information economics, Gans shows how sharing enhances most information’s value. He also shows how the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.

Provocative, intriguing, and useful, Information Wants to Be Shared will change the way you think about your ideas and the media you use to consume and produce them.

HBR Singles provide brief yet potent business ideas, in digital form, for today's thinking professional.

• 2026 © SAU Tech Bookstore. All Rights Reserved.