I’ll be attending the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles from 23-27 August, and I’ve made arrangements with one of the book-dealers, San Francisco’s Borderlands Books, to take orders for signed and inscribed copies of my novels and short story collection and cover the cost of shipping them within the US (you still have to pay for the books, though!).

If you’re interested in a signed, inscribed copy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town or my collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, you can call (888.893.4008), fax (415.824.8543), or email your order to the store, and they’ll get me to sign copies with your inscription. There is no charge for media-mail shipping within the continental US.

Priority mail in the US is $6.00 (that’s delivery within three
days or so). International will be Global Priority for $10 to Canada or
$12 elsewhere.

Books will ship after the Worldcon, in late August.

In my latest Information Week column, I discuss the way that loose, single-vendor anti-copying systems like iTunes Music Store DRM are just as bad for the public (and even worse for the music industry) as tight, super-restrictive systems are:

The iPod is the number one music player in the world. iTunes is the number one digital music store in the world. Customers don’t seem to care if there are restrictions on the media Steve Jobs sells them — though you’d be hard pressed to find someone who values those restrictions. No Apple customer woke up this morning wishing for a way to do less with her music.

But there’s one restriction that’s so obvious it never gets mentioned. This restriction does a lot of harm to Apple’s suppliers in the music industry.

That obvious restriction: No one but Apple is allowed to make players for iTunes Music Store songs, and no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod.

I recently wrote a column for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on how news-gathering works on blogs:

Wikipedia gets it wrong all the time. So do bloggers. But then, so do newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. The interesting thing about systems isn’t how they perform when they’re working to specification, it’s what happens when they fail.

Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There’s no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can’t make the edits yourself.

But if you find an error in a Wikipedia entry, you can fix it yourself. You can join the discussion about whether a blogger got it wrong. Automated tools like Technorati link together all the different blogs discussing the same topic, turning them into a conversation.

Two years ago, I spoke at Microsoft Research, giving a talk called “DRM and MSFT: A Product No Customer Wants.” The talk (see the transcript) has become a very widely cited resource on DRM, and has been translated into several languages, repurposed as an audiobook and a PowerPoint presentation, and so on. The video has apparently been one of the most-requested videos on the Microsoft internal network for years.

Now Microsoft has released this video to the public, though you need Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player to see it.

I’m writing a six-times-a-year column for Locus Magazine, the excellent trade magazine for the science fiction publishing industry. My first column, “Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet” has just gone live:

Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn’t until control of art was given over to the market — by giving publishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the Statute of Anne in 1710 — that we saw the explosion of creativity that investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren’t great arbiters of who could and couldn’t make art, but they were better than the Pope.

The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets to make art, and like each of the technological shifts in cultural production, it’s good for some artists and bad for others. The important question is: will it let more people participate in cultural production? Will it further decentralize decision-making for artists?

And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, “Will it be any good to our chosen medium?” Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It’s the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes, there’s also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I’m talking about prose fiction here — though this is clearly a sign of hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks).