Hal Stern got one of the first batch of limited edition hardcovers of With a Little Help, and he received it in time for Christmas. He’s lavishly documented his unboxing experience, and is clearly delighted with the book! I’m about to leave for Christmas holidays but I’ll be back to shipping new batches after January 10. Thanks to everyone who ordered the book so far — about 70 copies of the 250 have been sold!

My first thought, like any kid with a wrapped present in hand, was to tear open the packaging. However, the burlap sack is just wonderful. “Fondled” is too strong; I slowly unrolled the sack ensconcing my book, stopping to take pictures and note the defects in the burlap, the dyes and paints announcing its provenance, and to wipe up the floatsam left behind on my desk. I’ll never look at Amazon’s shrink wrap or packing peanuts with only minor disdain again. This was a labor of love. I saved the burlap sack for reasons that will (I hope) become clear when we finally move out of this house and I have to clean up my office.

What’s inside? Goodness, oh goodness. And a surprise.

Unboxing Cory Doctorow’s “With A Little Help”

In my latest Guardian column, “Keeping an email address secret won’t hide it from spambots,” I explain why I don’t bother to hide my email address from spambots and what I do instead to stay on top of spam:

I don’t really care how much spam gets eaten by my filters – all I care about is how much spam gets through; that is, how much spam I have to clear out by hand. If the server is culling 16,000 or 160,000 spams a day, it makes no difference to me. On the other hand, if the 100-300 spams I manually kill every day turned into 1,000-3,000, it would seriously undermine my productivity.

So I publish my email address, because I have yet to see any compelling evidence that hiding your email address or using silly techniques like spelling it out (doctorowATcraphoundDOTcom) is any proof against email harvesters. I can think of a way of detecting and converting such obfuscated email addresses, and if I can think of it, so can some spambot author, and she can write the code to do it.

I also have yet to see any compelling evidence that each additional publication of my email address accounts for any uptick in the amount of email that penetrates my filters. Surely after more than a decade, my email address is already in the databases of the world’s greatest and most prolific spammers. Re-adding it doesn’t make their spam any better at puncturing my defences.

Indeed, the main category of spam that makes it through the filter comes from PR people who have bought it as part of a list of journalists who they might pitch and who are hoping to get a product mentioned on Boing Boing. This is the hardest stuff to filter, since it comes from so many valid email addresses, each message containing unique body text that mentions me by name.

Keeping an email address secret won’t hide it from spambots

When I created the Lulu.com store for the With a Little Help paperbacks, I discovered that adding an ISBN to the books automatically raised the minimum price on the book from $11 or so to more than $17 (that’s because adding an ISBN makes the book available to retailers like Amazon, and Lulu wants to have some margin to use for a wholesale discount).

I wasn’t happy about this, but I figured it’d be worth trying a launch-high/discount-later pricing strategy until I could figure out how to get the price down. Now, with help from Lulu, I’ve figured out how to get the paperback price down to a much more reasonable $14.50. The present book interior features some 75 typo-fixes, crowdsourced from early readers (each typo is commemorated with a footnote thanking the eagle-eyed reader).

With a Little Help paperback