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Update: San Francisco signing

My signing at Borderlands is February 19, not 18:

February 19, 7PM: Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia Street, at 19th St, +1.888.893.4008

Down and Out relicensed today

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at this moment, standing on a stage at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, in which I lay out the case for what I've done and explain the myraid ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I'm announcing what' sin this blog post:

That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic...you get the picture.

I can't wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please!

My ETCON talk, in the Public Domain

I have just given a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, which is something of an anomaly for me in three ways:

1. I wrote out this talk, word for word, in advance of the presentation
2. I am releasing that written text as a free, public domain file, right now, moments before I get off the stage

So here's the text of that talk, dedicated to the Public Domain, for you to do with what you will.

This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can reproduced.

(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)

Wild remixes

Trevor Smith has whipped up two amazing remixes of Eastern Standard Tribe, my new novel. The first is a "speed-reader," based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you've found a back-door to your brain's comprehension nodes. The second is a "PurpleSlurped" version of the book, in which every paragraph is given its own link, so that one can easily refer to a specific passage of the text.

Remix Eastern Standard Tribe

Modesty B Catt has created a text-remixer called Cut-n-Paste-Rock-n-Roll that allows you to select from two or more of my novels and Alice in Wonderland, and, at the click of a button, machine-remix the text into a new work. I'm really enjoying this.

"What's wrong with you?" Art shook his head to the King, looking round the refreshments!' But there seemed to think that proved it at the end of the way. They let me expense it. I'll be one of great relief. 'Now at ours they had settled down again, the cook took the watch and looked at them with large round eyes, and half of them--and it belongs to a doze; but, on being back in Ottawa, freelancing advice to clueless MPs dealing with Taiwanese and Sierra Leonese OEM importers.

Audie's married to a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman's restaurant, or give him a reproachful look. "I'm sorry, all right?" he asked.

Downunder download mirror

The good folks at PlanetMirror have set up a mirror mirror (and an FTP mirror) for Eastern Standard Tribe in Australia, for your antipodean pleasure (or in case this server gets busied out!).

Paul Boutin

It's less science fiction, more supercaffeinated extrapolation ("...expialidocious!") of today's always-on lifestyle crowd, of which Cory has plenty of firsthand experience. The narrator's dilemma is spelled out at the start: His friends have committed him to a mental hospital as part of a plot. Except there's the nagging suspicion he may really be going nuts. As with a Vonnegut novel, it's the gradual filling in of details over the next 300 pages by an unreliable narrator that makes it an engaging read.
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