Well, it’s certainly a learning-experience kind of day.

Long story short: HarperCollins has shipped a beautiful, limited edition slipcased and signed edition of LITTLE BROTHER. But there are some problems:

1. Their ecommerce system is messed up and you have to phone in to order your copies

2. Due to a silly territorial rights issue, they won’t ship to the US or Canada

But don’t despair! A fantastic British online bookseller called The Book Depository:

1. Can sell the limited edition

2. Is charging *less* than HarperCollins for it

3. Doesn’t charge for shipping

4. Ships to the US, Canada and 40+ other countries

5. Processes payment in your local currency, saving you currency conversion fees

Sorry to be learning in public here, but I’m pretty happy that this worked out the way it did!

Little Brother Limited Edition on The Book Depository

HarperCollins have just brought out a beautiful limited deluxe edition of my novel Little Brother. It’s a slipcased hardcover, in a limited run of 500 signed copies, and it sports eight spectacular original illustrations by Richard Wilkinson (along with some really snazzy endpapers: a map of San Francisco’s Mission district redrawn as a circuit-diagram). All the art is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licensed, too, and ready for your fan Little Brother remixes.

Now the bad news: it’s only available outside of the US and Canada, due to a really silly bit of lawyerly risk-aversion about territorial rights. I’m working on seeing if there’s a way to arrange to do a grey-market export to US/Canada, and earmarking, say, 100 of them for this purpose, but I can’t make any guarantees.

But the good news for Britons is that HarperCollins will guarantee delivery before Xmas if you buy before Friday! Get ’em while they last!

Update: OK, the payment processor here is SERIOUSLY b0rked. You can order copies by phone here: +44 (0)870 787 1724

Little Brother – Cory Doctorow
Limited Edition Deluxe Version

High rez, Creative Commons licensed art by Richard Wilkinson

Over the weekend, two educators wrote to me to tell me about blogs that contain curricular material based on my books.

The first, from Donald Riggs at Drexel College in Philadelphia, contains links and supplementary material for students reading my second short story collection, Overclocked. Donald put the material together because Overclocked was Drexel’s book of the year, given to the entire freshman class (I visited campus in November and met with students, taught a writing program, and gave a lecture). He’s got a ton of good supplementary links and glossaries explaining the technical and genre terms for a lay audience.

The second, from Deborah Menkart at the Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People ’s History project is a recommendation for teachers whose students are working with Howard Zinn’s brilliant “Peoples’ History” books to include Little Brother in their works.

Coming from a family of teachers (both parents, brother) and serving on faculty at two universities at present (Open University, UK and University of Waterloo, Canada), I’m always intensely gratified when educators use my material with their students.

The Digital Democracy project and the All-Burma I.T. Student Union have just a few hours left in a Kickstarter project to translate my novel Little Brother in free electronic editions in four Burmese languages: Burmese, Karen, Chin and Kachin. As they write, “[the translation will] broaden the debate on using technology in the struggle for freedom against tyranny. By distributing electronic versions of the translated book, our goal is to inspire people from the country with Cory Doctorow’s compelling tale of a teen and his friends who take on Big Brother, using technology to challenge an authoritarian regime.”

They’re 64% of the way there as of this writing, and they need another $800 or so in the next 43 hours. I’m pretty excited by this novel use of goal-oriented online fundraising by activist groups, and the Burmese lot really seem to have a handle on how technology fits into their national struggles for justice.