Espen Andersen writes, “After buying ‘Little Brother’, I discovered that a page was torn out. Rather than exchange it, I just printed out the missing page from Cory’s webpage.”

Yet another argument for CC books

I’m delighted and honored to announced that my YA novel Little Brother has won the 2009 Sunburst YA award for best Canadian sf novel for kids. The Sunburst is named for Phyllis Gottleib’s first novel, my friend and the “mother of Canadian science fiction,” who died this year, so it’s especially poignant and significant to have won this in 2009. I also won the Sunburst in the adult category for my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

My sincere thanks to the jury for making this book their choice, and to the donors who make the Sunburst possible.

Ross sez, “Recently, I stumbled upon a website called wordle.net, which creates images out of text files. The image is calculated in a histogram style, with words that appear more appearing larger than words that don’t appear as often. I decided to hack the algorithm by pasting ‘Little Brother Cory Doctorow’ about a thousand times (don’t worry- it wasn’t labor intensive- I used gvim and the handy keyboard shortcuts) before the text of your novel to allow your name and the title to appear more prominently in the image, for those that are into that sort of thing. The wordles have a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, so I’m pretty sure they could be redistributed instead of your licensed cover art on freely downloadable versions, if you felt like it. The only caveat is that you need to attribute the image to wordle.net. The images I have attached are free for you to use. I’m not related to this website at all. I just thought it was cool.”