[dwild]

His email is available on his profile, so he essentially already shared it for free...

I agree that it's not exactly free because it has a value, just like your comment right now has one. However it doesn't represent a monetary loss from you (just like your comment right now), which I believe is what he meant by free.

If you believe your personnal email and phone number has a value higher than this ebook, than yeah, don't exchange them, that would be absurd.

[chme]

Well he put his email in a not so easily readable format in there, so someone has to take effort and invest time to generate a correct email address from it. With this time investment getting to the email address costs money. So not for free ;)

But of course now we are definitely nitpicking on a philosophical level.

My point basically if someone says something is free, but requests your personal data in return, then that is not free.