Two things attested to the health of the market for idea books in 2008. First was the rock-star reception accorded Malcolm Gladwell on his arrival in London at the end of November. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, filled a West End theatre with eager fans when he turned up to talk about his latest book Outliers, which promised to deflate the idea of individual genius and “tell the story of success”.

Second was the haste with which such books were snapped up by politicians in search of inspiration. Before Outliers, the noisiest ideas book of the year was Nudge. Written by two University of Chicago academics, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Nudge focused on how, with a little discreet encouragement, human behaviour can be ushered in the right direction. When word got out that David Cameron had read it, sales soared.

Clearly the Leader of the Opposition is a man of ideas. He is in luck as there are plenty of idea books to choose from. While academic research has became ever more specialised and narrow, a legion of idea entrepreneurs such as Gladwell is talking about ideas and social trends and coming up with easily digestible abstractions that might explain them. Where academics and policy wonks often revel in unnecessary jargon, the new ideas men - and most are men - relentlessly brand their books with buzzwords to push them out to a wide audience. The books sell because of a conviction that ideas don't have to be taken like cough mixture: they can be fun and, once you recognise their implications, you see them at work everywhere.

So what sort of ideas will be around in 2009? At the end of January arrives Liberal Fascism, the intellectual equivalent of talk radio by the Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg. He argues that “the most insidious attempts to control our lives originate from the Left, whether it's smoking bans or security cameras”. One can see how this might appeal to some of the neoconservatives on the Tory front bench, but politicians keen to reach out to younger voters will need to seek the advice of an internet guru. In March 2008 the New Yorker Clay Shirky published Here Comes Everybody, which gave another outing to the idea that mass, internet-based collaboration is slowly changing the fabric of modern life.

So what next from the burgeoning ranks of the internet philosophers? Due for publication in June is Free, the latest from Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of the bestseller The Long Tail. Free will argue that in the internet age, business models everywhere are being upended by a flood of free goods - newspapers and holiday flights, for example - and that companies and institutions must think about giving things away to make money elsewhere.

The idea that we can give away things free and still make money is hardly novel, but it could only be done by cross-subsidising the giveaway with something paid for. Anderson argues that as the price of internet bandwidth and storage continues to drop, the prices of products themselves will go into free fall, particularly those that can be delivered by the net to millions of people at little extra marginal cost.

Anderson's “freenomics” work best for the media and entertainment industries, and this suggests that these industries will have to think up creative ways to add “premium” value to their products, or bundle them with something else entirely.

It is also rumoured that Anderson will give away copies gratis, but his premise may have to be reviewed in the light of the economic crisis.

In the same month comes Bill Wasik's And Then There's This: How Stories Live or Die in Viral Culture. Wasik invented the first “flash mob” in June 2003 when he used e-mail and text to invite 200 young New Yorkers to converge on a store in the city. His book is the latest search for the holy grail of the net - why certain things propagate themselves and are passed around like a virus to be seen by audiences of millions.

The search for what geeks are calling the “internet meme” (after Richard Dawkins' neologism for a cultural idea that is transmitted like a gene), or how hype whizzes from peer to peer around the decentralised net, is of huge interest to everyone from artists to advertisers.

Politicians in search of weightier reading may have to wait until the second half of the year. In the autumn we can expect a timely reinterpretation of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes by Robert Skidelsky. And both Gordon Brown and Mr Cameron might have to fight each other over Amartya Sen's eagerly awaited The Idea of Justice. The Harvard Professor and Nobel prize-winning economist is a paragon of contemporary liberalism, and made some well-judged criticisms of the British model of multiculturalism in his recent book Identity and Violence. His latest, expected in July, aims to present an overarching theory of justice for a society in which different ethnic and religious groups can reasonably have different views of what it is. It promises to be the most talked-about book on the subject since John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, nearly 40 years ago.

One certainty is that most of the ideas books that come our way next year will be from America. American writers and thinkers seem to have the knack of explaining complex ideas in an accessible way for a popular audience. Partly this is because they are better at branding ideas with a headline title - The Tipping Point, or The Wisdom of Crowds. But perhaps British publishers lack the confidence to bring British and European authors to market unless they have been road-tested in America first. Philip Blond, the Tory ideas man of the moment, is at present hawking around a manuscript called Red Tory in which he argues for a “radical combination of economic egalitarianism that extends assets and capital to all”. With green Toryism all but abandoned, it could be just what his leader is looking for. So far, however, Blond has been unable to find a publisher.

James Harkin's Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea that's Changing How We Live and Who We Are is published by Little, Brown in February

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden