Vernor “Singularity” Vinge on the book-launch:

One of the wonderful things about our times is that individual writers are empowered and can experiment with new ways of getting the word out. If there aren’t too many new laws made, I think this will ultimately give us much better ways of doing things (and probably a large variety of such new ways).
— Vernor

California Author is running a feature on Down and Out, called The Whuffie Channel.

01/10/2003 The Whuffie Channel. Cory Doctorow imagines a world where death and copyright have a cure. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books) is set in the post-death, post-work, net-in-your-head future. It is in bookstores this week and yesterday it was one of Amazon’s top 300 sellers. His future-is-now marketing strategy: the entire book can also be downloded for free at his website, where readers are encouraged to share it. In the first 24 hours, the book was downloaded 20,000 times.

Wired News has posted coverage of the release of my novel:

Doctorow’s fans aren’t surprised to find his book online for free. The plots of his most recent short story, “0wnz0red,” involves digital rights management, or how files are protected from sharing and copying.

Moreover, Doctorow is known outside science fiction circles for his prolific, passionate posts about digital rights issues on the BoingBoing weblog and other forums, as well as his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“I don’t believe that I am giving up book royalties,” Doctorow said about persuading his publisher, Tor Books, to make Down and Out available digitally for free under the new Creative Commons licensing system.

“(Downloads) crossed the 10,000-download threshold at 8 a.m. this morning,” Doctorow said Thursday, “which exceeds the initial print run for the book.”

Doctorow said he thinks the marketing buzz from those downloads will be worth more than any lost book sales. “I think that the Internet’s marvelous ability to spread information to places where it finds a receptive home is the best thing that could happen to a new writer like me.”

Volunteers have sent in copies of the novel in multiple file formats (PalmOS PDB, Apple Newton PKG, PalmOS Palm Reader, and Microsoft LIT). They’re linked off the downloads page.

24 hours after launching the site from which you can download my novel for free, the book has been downloaded over 20,000 times. It’s been Slashdotted, blogged to hell and back, and I’ve done a number of press interviews about it. What’s more, the title is currently sitting at #304 in the Amazon Sales Rank. Let’s call this one a success. I could not be more stoked. Damn.

Thanks to Jason Andrade for setting up a mirror of the downloads page in Australia for your antipodean convenience.

I’ve done an interview with Creative Commons about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in which I go into some depth about the motivation for releasing the book online, gratis.

Well, in some ways, this novel is a parable about Napster, and about the reputation economies that projects like Ringo, Firefly, Epinions and Amazon hint at. In a world where information is nonscarce, the problem isn’t finding generic information — it’s finding useful information. There’s an old chestnut in online science fiction fandom that the Internet “makes us all into slushreaders.” (“Slush” is the unsolicited prose that arrives at publishers’ offices — a “slushreader” wades through thousands of these paste-gems looking for the genuine article). This has always struck me as a pretty reactionary position.

Nearly every piece of information online has a human progenitor — a person who thought it was useful or important or interesting enough to post. Those people have friends whom they trust, and those friends have trusted friends, and so on. Theoretically, if you use your social network to explore the Web, you can make educated guesses about the relative interestingness of every bit of info online to you. In practice, this kind of social exploration is very labor-intensive and even computationally intensive, but there’s a lot of technology on the horizon that hints at this…

Scarcity is, objectively, worse than plenty. When you’ve got lots of some useful object, you’re richer than when you have less of it. When there’s more than enough to go around, the economic value tends to plummet, but the utility is just as high. Think of oxygen: on the Earth’s surface, we’re well-supplied with breathable atmosphere. Aside from a few egregiously West-coast “oxygen bars,” it’s hard to imagine paying money for O2. But in Heinlein’s sf novels set on the moon, there’s a thriving trade in oxygen. In both situations, air is highly useful, but dirtsiders are richer in air than their loonie cousins.

Modesty has used a cut-up engine called Alice — named for Jeff Noon’s brilliant Automated Alice — to slice and dice Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into a bunch of random, interesting chunklets. It’s damned weird stuff and it warms my cockles.

“Honk!” she said, after a short queue of older men, then there was no way of mirrors and into hers as we stood by the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents over for a couple glasses from the Bitchun Society didn’t need to convert its detractors, just outlive them. The first time I debarked for the patchy red welts from the computer where it disappeared into the discussion. If I needed to do that, too.” Was I really advocating being more like you and start playing. Others would pick up their own jokes, and even though he blew his spiel about half the time. “Lillian,” he said, cautiously. “Doctor Pete is a couple of days, starting the rehab is a terrific attraction, and it’s going to live, I’d like to have a backup made before she did.

My pal Bill Shunn — a hell of an sf writer and top-notch geek — has started a Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom webring for fansites devotes to the book. I am beside myself.

I anticipate a desire among fans of the book to visit the sites where it (took/will take) place, sort of like hitting the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic cathedral, and snap photos proving they were there. Hoping to be the first to do so, and maybe thereby accumulate some whuffie of my own, I present the “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Whuffie Ring,” a web ring to let people link up their Down and Out fan pages.

So go ahead. Travel to Florida. Visit Liberty Square, the Hall of the Presidents, the Haunted Mansion. Get your picture taken with one of its 999 happy haunts. You loved Disney World when you were a kid–you know you did. Now’s your chance to show the world you love what it could someday be.