Wired Editor Chris Anderson Squares Off Against Macmillan CEO John Sargent on Free and Paid Content

Photo: (left to right) Chris Anderson, Gary Hoenig, John Sargent, Alan Murray

Last night’s discussion, Free AND Paid Content: Business Models That Work, hinged on whether consumers of news and books should and will pay for content online. But it became a tense intellectual slugging match between John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishing, and moderator Chris Anderson, most recently the author of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.”

“We have not grown up in an atmosphere of free books” — Sargent

Anderson contended that free digital copies could bring books back into the “cultural conversation,” while Sargent held steady as the consistent voice of dissent, expressing a grim forecast for the publishing industry and noting that it’s “hard to imagine books as a growth business.”

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