Novelist, BoingBoing founder, digerati padawan and digital rights freedom fighter Cory Doctorow has just released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. I’m not a consumer of science-fiction, but I quite enjoyed his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Like his first novel, Cory has put his money where his politics are and released this book for free, on the Internet:
To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact…These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice — rip, mix and burn! — and that’s what I’m hoping you will do with this.
Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you — the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers — hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.
Bonus points for using addlepated. Last time, I downloaded the first chapter of Down and Out to see if I liked it. I think I’ll probably move directly to the dead-tree version this time. I don’t like to own many things, but I like my books.
DarrenBarefoot.com 