The well written essay/presentation provides the audience with insight into Mr. Doctorow’s views especially on intellectual property ownership in an on demand digital world.
Harriet Klausney, Midwest Book Review
Monthly Archives::
February 2012
Review:
San Francisco Book Review
In a scant one hundred pages, Doctorow infuses our imagination with engaging characters, a tightly woven narrative, and carefully woven themes of isolation, family, and genetic engineering into Jimmy’s journey through the American wasteland. Doctorow eloquently marks the differences between change and progress as one of Jimmy’s preoccupations.
Wendy Iraheta, San Francisco Book Review
Here’s a short interview I did last week in Chicago with WNIJ, an NPR affiliate. MP3 link
Nicole Powers from Suicide Girls sat down with me at my office last month for a long, in-depth interview that’s just been published: “You can’t escape it anywhere. It’s a race to the bottom all around the world right now. Canada, Germany, the US, and the UK, as well as the rest of the EU, are basically locked in a race to see who can implement 1984 the fastest. The US — obviously now you’ve got indefinite detention for American citizens on US soil. In Canada we’re on the verge of getting this lawful intercept bill that’s as bad as anything anywhere else in the world. In the UK we have the Digital Economy Act and widespread biometrics. In Germany the police just got caught deploying what they’ve called the 0zapftis Trojan, the government trojan where when people cross the borders and they examine their laptops they covertly put spyware on their computers so they can watch them after the fact. I mean really, at every turn there’s somebody doing this, so it doesn’t matter where you live. It really doesn’t at this point. That’s one of the things that I’ve really come to realize, the fight is global.”
Review:
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
It’s pure Doctorow, filled with more invention and movement than many writers can fit into a book series
Charles de Lint, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Here’s a podcast of my last Publishers Weekly column, Digital Lysenkoism :
Talking with the lower echelon employees of publishing reminds me of a description I once read about the mutual embarrassment of Western and Soviet biologists when they talked about genetics. Soviet-era scientists were required, on pain of imprisonment, to endorse Lysenkoism, a discredited theory of inheritance favored by Stalin for ideological reasons. Lysenko believed, incorrectly, that you could create heritable characteristics by changing a parent organism—that is, if you cut off one of a frog’s legs, a certain number of its offspring would be born with three legs.
Lysenkoism was a disaster. When it was applied to food cultivation it led to ghastly famines that killed millions. So, when Soviet scientists met their Western counterparts, everyone knew that Lysenkoism was an awful absurdity. But the Soviet scientists had to pretend it wasn’t. Not unlike some of the discussions inside today’s major publishing houses when it comes to DRM.
I recently solicited several writers for inclusion in the Humble E-book Bundle, for which I’m acting as a volunteer editor. The Humble E-book Bundle is the first foray into e-books by the Humble Indie Bundle project, a nonprofit that has run several insanely successful video-game distribution events in which customers got to name their own prices for a collection of independent, DRM-free games. Each of the Humble Indie Bundle projects so far has grossed around a million dollars and has made hundreds of thousands of dollars for each contributor . And I’ve recruited enthusiastic contributors from all of the big six publishers for the Humble E-Book Bundle—that is, all except one, which has an all-DRM-all-the-time policy and won’t consider publishing anything without DRM in any of its divisions.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
