I finally got to see the paperback of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is out just in time for Christmas. For various good reasons, Tor elected to publish the hardcover in January of last year, too late for Christmas shoppers. A lot of people complained (including me), but it’s clear that they knew what they were doing — the book didn’t end up competing with the big, frontlist holiday titles and sold very well indeed. Still, I’m very grateful indeed that the paperback (which Amazon has for $10.36) is out in time for the holidays this year.

Phillip Torrone, a leading home-robotics hobbyist, has just acquired a new Aibo, and he’s named it “Whuffie.” This video clip of the dog meeting its new masters is utterly charming.

Jack Willliam Bell has started a really interesting discussion about Whuffie and my novel on his Slashdot journal:

In these discussions the usual answer given is that human creativity will retain value and that people would still buy and sell hand-made items, artwork, books and songs. But this rings false to me on a number of levels, not the least of which is the fact that not everyone is talented enough to participate in such an ecomomy. A more important problem with this answer is the fact that, with the exception of hand-made items and original artwork, this actually relies on the continuation of false scarcity by requiring intellectual property limits which could not be maintained in a digitally networked world. (All this was before I ever heard of DRM of course.)

Reputation ecomonies, however, could be based on anything people valued in other people — not just their personal creativity. And such a currency would bring value to the creator of a song even if the song was freely traded without intellectual property limits. So, should money ecomonies collapse, you could still have a valuation system built on how others percieved you.