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The Times Center in New York City was packed on Friday with some of the brightest minds in both business and technology for the first-ever east coast edition of BizTechDay, a one-day conference for entrepreneurs now in its third year.

The event, which was keynoted by Seth Godin, featured an impressive list of speakers peppered with brief demos of Web-based products aimed at startups and small businesses.

This week we've got a book hot off the presses for your weekly dose of entrepreneurial reading as 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back with their second book. Released earlier this month, Rework, a no-nonsense rethinking of how to successfully start and run a business, is the second book from Fried and Heinemeier who earlier authored Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.

Quitting is one the easiest things there is to do. When we face a challenge that appears insurmountable, we would sooner give up and try something else rather than push through the pain of that challenge. But the truth is, trying something else is only going to lead towards another challenge, and becoming a serial quitter is most definitely not the right path to head down.

Seth Godin, author of the bestselling books Purple Cow and the more recent Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, is also the author of 2007's The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick). According to Godin, while quitting is often a poor snap decision made under stress, under the right circumstances it is a smart choice for turning around a dead-end situation.

Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available for free in text form and as an audio book), is stirring controversy and a spicy conversation around the blogosphere. The current wave of discussion started with a critical review by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. In his review, Gladwell defends journalism and goes negative on "Free." Seth Godin, who till then had stayed out of the debate, penned an instantly classic Godin post titled "Malcolm is wrong."

Mike Masnick followed on TechDirt with an insightful post in which he attributes some of Gladwell's confusion to the way that Anderson wrote the book. Masnick says that the book does not provide enough details on the mechanics and applications of Free. (I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on that.) Fred Wilson joined the conversation with a sharply delivered post on Freemium and Freeconomics. He gives examples of the kinds of Free that actually work.