My latest Publishers Weekly column, “With a Little Twitter Help,” describes the invaluable aid I’ve gotten in my ongoing self-publishing project, With a Little Help, by asking my readers through Twitter for help. I’ve now got a functional SD card cloner, free packaging materials, and a website design, and as soon as a few technical/contractual details are ironed out with Lulu.com, I’ll be ready to launch:

Soon after, another realization hit me: I still had no idea how to ship these things. I used to run the mailroom at Bakka Books, the SF store in Toronto, and I got very good at improvising cardboard book mailers out of scrap boxes. But I really wanted something less labor-intensive. I’d planned on using a 4mm cardboard book box, similar to the ones used by Amazon for single-book mailings. I’d then pad the book inside. I’m charging $275 apiece, so I figure I better make sure the books arrive intact! I was just about to order some bubble-wrap sleeves when my eyes lit on a small stack of burlap coffee sacks on one of my storeroom shelves.

I love coffee sacks. The burlap is soft but scratchy, tactile, and it smells great—coffee and sisal. I thought, if I got a book wrapped in this, I’d love it. So I cut up a sack and tried tying a book in a couple of configurations. I snapped some pix, put them on Flickr, and tweeted: would you be delighted to get a book wrapped like this, or put off? The chorus of “delighted” was unanimous. So much for less labor intensive—but as an “Internet guy” I must say I’m finding all this physical stuff almost indecently pleasurable. It’s like being back in arts and crafts class.

My Twitter followers also pointed out that I’d need a layer of acid-free paper between the books and the burlap to prevent scratching, and several sent in the URLs for Web sites devoted to Japanese fabric wrapping. A few hours later, I got a tweet from the legendary Square Mile coffee roasters here in London. They have more coffee sacks than they know what to do with; could I come and take some, please? Another Twitter follower recommended a cheap cardboard mailer supplier called Zetland. I bought 30 boxes of mailers for £23.80.

With a Little Twitter Help

I’m speaking this weekend at the London edition of James Randi’s The Amazing Meeting, a two-day event featuring the likes of Stephen Fry, James Randi, Alan Moore, Graham Linehan, PZ Myers, Susan Blackmore, Rebecca Watson, and Simon Singh (and many more!). The Amazing Meeting is a fundraiser to support science and critical thinking.

TAM London 2010 is a world-class fundraising conference which this year is being held on 16 – 17 October 2010 at the Hilton London Metropole hotel. Join amazing speakers and over 1000 like-minded delegates for a fundraising celebration of science, critical thinking and entertainment in the heart of the city.

PLUS delegates have the chance to buy exclusive tickets to the premiere of Tim Minchin’s Storm movie and spend Saturday evening being entertained by Tim and special guests. A totally unique opportunity!

And if that wasn’t amazing enough, we’ve also arranged for a very special performance of Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories on Friday 15th October just for TAM Delegates, with £5 off all tickets!

The TAM Fringe is also back this year, with free or nearly-free events in the week before and after TAM.

The Amazing Meeting London

Rebel UK MP Tom Watson and I are speaking together tonight at a panel for the Wesminster Skeptics, held in London at 7PM, free to enter, on the subject of “Beyond the Digital Economy Act.”

Beyond the Digital Economy Act

Panel including Cory Doctorow and Tom Watson MP

When?
Monday, October 11 at 7:00PM

Where?
The Monk Exchange
Strutton Ground
London
SW1H 0HW

What’s the talk about?
Now the Digital Economy Act has been passed, what happens next?

Beyond the Digital Economy Act – Monday, October 11 at 7:00PM

Here’s a set of Michael Eleftheriades’s photos of William Gibson and me on stage last night at London’s Intelligence Squared event.

In this week’s Guardian column, “The real cost of free,” I reply to last week’s broadside by my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall, who accused me of charging enormous fees to encourage creators to give their works away. After correcting the record on fees (most of my talks are free, a small number are paid for, and a tiny fraction of those are paid for at large amounts), I go to the meat of the issue: what is it that I tell people when they ask me to speak at their events?

But I don’t care if you want to attempt to stop people from copying your work over the internet, or if you plan on building a business around this idea. I mean, it sounds daft to me, but I’ve been surprised before.

But here’s what I do care about. I care if your plan involves using “digital rights management” technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won’t be able to catch infringers if you can’t spy on every video.

And this is the plan that the entertainment industries have pursued to in their doomed attempt to prevent copying. The US record industry has sued 40,000 people. The BBC has received Ofcom’s approval to use our mandatory licence fees to lock up its broadcasts with DRM so that we can’t tinker with or improve on our own TVs and recorders (and lest you think that this is no big deal, keep in mind that the entire web was created by amateurs tinkering with systems around them). What’s more Apple, Audible, Sony and others have stitched up several digital distribution channels with mandatory DRM requirements, so copyright holders don’t get to choose to make their works available on equitable terms.

In France, the HADOPI “three strikes” rule just went into effect; they’re sending out 10,000 legal threats a week now, and have promised 150,000 a week in short order. After three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement, your whole family is disconnected from the Internet –from work, education, civic engagement, distant relatives, health information, community. And of course, we’ll have the same regime here shortly, thanks to the Digital Economy Act, passed in a three-whip washup in the last days of parliament without any substantive debate, despite the thousands and thousands of Britons who asked their legislators to at least discuss this extraordinarily technical legislation before passing it into law.

The real cost of free