News

DRM is to publishing as science was to Stalinism

My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Digital Lysenkoism," a look at the bizarre internal forces that causes people who work at publishers to defend DRM, even though they know it doesn't work.

I also recently chatted with a big-six digital strategist, who explained to me how his employer would soon be sending out all of its digital advanced reader copies (ARCs) as DRM-crippled PDFs. We shared a moment of incredulous silence at this. Most reviewers, after all, get hundreds of times more material than they can ever use. I literally get 100 books in the post for every one that I choose to review, and the idea that reviewers like me will put up with crippled e-ARCs that must be read at one’s desk or on one’s laptop, that we can’t load onto our tablets or e-readers, that generate all kinds of failures in the wee hours of the night, on weekends, or on airplanes when no one is around to offer technical support—well, it’s beyond absurd.

What will happen to these crippled e-ARCs, most likely, is that they will be ignored. This is exactly what happens to most DRM-locked screener copies distributed to voters for major film awards, like the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards. When you have 50 times more movies to consider than you could possibly watch, and when 10% of those movies require you to figure out how to connect a special player to your already overly complex home theater, well, that just makes it easy to exclude 10% of the load.

With A Little Help: Digital Lysenkoism

(Image: Lysenko with Stalin.gif, public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

Little Brother play, extended

The San Francisco Chronicle loves the stage adaptation of my novel Little Brother, and brings the welcome news that its run has been extended by two weeks!

Edited Spark interview about the “coming war on general purpose computation”

I did an interview last week with the CBC Radio show The Spark (I podcasted the complete interview when they posted it); now they've put up the edited episode. MP3 link

Interview with CBC’s Spark on the coming war on general-purpose computation

I did a quick interview with the CBC Radio programme "The Spark" last week from my office in London, talking about my idea of "the upcoming war on general purpose computing." They've just posted the unedited audio in advance of airing a shorter excerpt. MP3 link

Little Brother stage-play in San Francisco

There's a new stage adaptation of my novel Little Brother opening in San Francisco. Charlie Jane Anders from IO9 got to go to the preview and loved it, which is incredibly heartening, since I won't get to see it!

So I'll just say that the version I saw was powerful and brilliant, and the cast was note-perfect, especially Daniel Petzold as Marcus Yallow. (The other two castmembers, Marissa Keltie and Cory Censoprano, have a harder task in some ways, since they play a variety of roles throughout the show. And they're both great as well.) The stage play uses a lot of pre-recorded video and some very clever sets to create a lot of different settings, as well as giving a primer in topics like the futility of using data-mining to catch terrorists.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother becomes a must-see stage play

Martian Chronicles, part two

The StarShipSofa podcast has the second installment of Jeff Lane's reading of my YA novella The Martian Chronicles (here's part one). Lane does a great job with the reading. MP3 link.

Podcast: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future

Here's a podcast of my last Locus column, A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future:

Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a half-brother, the strange assertion that ‘‘science fiction is dead because the future is here.’’

Now, I will stipulate that science fiction writers often think that they’re predicting the future. The field lays claim to various successes, from flip-phones to the Web, waterbeds to rocket-ships, robots to polyamory.

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.

MP3 Link

“Martian Chronicles” reading

The Starship Sofa podcast has produced an excellent reading of my novella "The Martian Chronicles," which was originally published in Jonathan Strahan's YA anthology Life on Mars. The reading is by jeff Lane, who's really talented. Here's the MP3 (the reading starts around 1:50).

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation

Here's a transcript of my keynote at the 28th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin over Christmas week, "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation." Here're the relevant links:

* Video
* Transcript (Joshua Wise)
* German translation (Christian Wöhrl)
* Subtitles in German, French, Spanish and Italian (you can add more!)

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.

MP3 Link

The internet is the best place for dissent to start

The Guardian

Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com is proudly powered by WordPress
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).