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Eastern Standard Tribe - new book by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow, blogging at boingboing.net, has released a new book. Like his last, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (great read, get it!), it is released under Creative Commons and available for free download.

His last book was an excellent read, and has been distributed far and wide over the Internet:

The thing that's extraordinary about that first novel is that it was released under terms governed by a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to copy the book freely and distribute it far and wide. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were made and distributed this way. Hundreds of thousands.

Whether he has gotten paid, I don't know. I for one still have a huge IOU in my mental drawer with things to take care of for Cory. This time I am going to make up for it, by now I know that Cory's work is worth some of my hard earned cash. If I help Cory being able to produce, I will get more good thoughts, reads and boingboing-bouncy stuff.

If you liked the book, that's good to know (you can email me to tell me so, if you'd like, but please don't be offended if I don't get a chance to answer; I love to read the messages even if I don't have time to respond to all of them). If your sense of duty demands that you compensate me, well, you can always buy a copy, which gets me my royalty and gets my publisher some sales-figures that show that this kind of thing is a good idea. If you don't care to own the dead-tree edition, you can always donate it to a shelter or a school or a public library.

Get it. Read it. Pay for the paper edition if you like it. Please let this model work and spill over on the music industry.... ;) And hey, if you don't need the paper copy, sign up over at BookCrossing and send the book on a journey!

The future is my business, more or less. I'm a science fiction writer. One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present. Here's a thing I've noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here's another thing I've noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn't mean that the book is dying -- no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying -- but it does mean that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive and well: we're reading our brains out! I just think that the complex social practice of "book" -- of which a bunch of paper pages between two covers is the mere expression -- is transforming and will transform further.

Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow: Down and out in the Magic Kingdom

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