Free

is an excellent book by Chris Anderson (isbn 978-1-9052-1148-7). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The internet is the first distribution system in history that is as well suited for the niche as for the mass, for the obscure as well as the mainstream.

Just as Moore's Law dictates that a unit of computer processing power halves in price every two years, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster.

For most of human history manure has determined how much food we had... Historians often look at the great civilizations of the ancient world through the lens of three grains: rice, wheat, and corn. Rice is protein rich but extremely hard to grow. Wheat is easy to grow but protein poor. Only corn is both easy to grow and plump with protein.

Humans are wired to understand scarcity better than abundance.

At some point in your life, you may wake up and realize that you have more money than time.

What [Alan] Kay realized was that a technologist's job is not to figure out what technology is good for. Instead it is to make technology so cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous that anybody can use it.

Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.

Paradoxes are the opposite of contradictions. Contradictions shut themselves down, but paradoxes keep themselves going, because every time you acknowledge the truth of one side you're going to get caught from behind by the truth on the other side.

Information is what British anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as "a difference that makes a difference."

The electricity consumed by a server now costs more over the life of that server than the server itself.

Rather than depriving life of purpose, material abundance created a scarcity of meaning.