Zach at neuroatomik is posting Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on his blog, one chapter at a time, with spaces at the end of each post to discuss the chapter.

This morning’s edition of SFGate is running an interview with me about this book:

I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics looks like. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with the management of resources that are scarce. If it’s valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted].

Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn’t a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep shit grass — where the more you graze, the more commons you get. So I took the idea of nanotechnology as the means whereby any good can be reproduced infinitely, at zero marginal cost, and tried to use that as a metaphor for the online world we actually live in.

The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier — television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.

Some tasty ruminations on Whuffie and how it could apply to the real world from X, on his blog:

It just occurred to me society could use Whuffie for good incentive, for example, when you go to the doctor you get a point for regular check ups in your health whuffie, (heh, my whuffie is a little flat on that one), and if you choose the doctors check-up results would give or take WUPM. Your credit rating, portfolio, liabilities and assets would all tabulate in a financial WUPM, for the less fortunate they could accrue financial WUPM based on movement, like a business venture,education or the ability to create wealth, kind of a curve to keep the wealthy from having to unfair and advantage and giving those disadvantaged incentive to accumulate Whuffie through forward motion.

Ten days after the launch of my novel, I’ve gotten more than 50,000 downloads from this site, plus untold email, p2p and mirrored transfers. I’ve done so many interviews about the book and the Creative Commons that it’s actually cutting into my writing time. Thanks to everyone who helped make this a success.

Aaron Swartz reports spotting Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in a bookstore in Chicago. Have you seen the book in the wild yet? (I haven’t). Post to the Comments link!

Thanks to Dorthea Salo‘s excellent work in converting Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to html using stylesheets that abstract the presentation from the markup, it’s very easy to change the way the book looks to suit your own reading tastes. Steven Garrity has posted his own version of the book with an alternate stylesheet that’s more to his liking.

Technically, the Creative Commons license probably forbids this without my permission, but I gave it to Steven and I’m giving it to you. I’d love to see your alternate stylesheets for the book — just post ’em to the Comments section below!

I did an interview with P2Pnet.net about the release of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that came out great:

“Word-of-mouth is the only consistently successful means for turning first novels by relative unknowns into successes,” Cory told p2pnet.net. “Books like Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood became bestsellers through being passed hand to hand by passionate believers in the text. My book attempts to articulate the unspoken motivation behind the Free Software movement, the Web, and all the tech-for-tech’s-sake projects that my tribe (which is both sizeable and growing) spends its leisure hours contributing to.

“This tribe is smeared across cyberspace, and rarely meets face-to-face – its hand-to-hand mechanisms are email, p2p, the Web, IRC. Making my book amenable to travel by these mechanisms ensures that if it catches the imagination and passion of my readers, they’ll have the same ability that Ya-Ya Sisterhood’s supporters had.”

Some answers to frequently asked questions:

Q: Where does the word Whuffie come from?

A: It’s just a made-up word we used interchangably with “Brownie Points” in high-school. Some people have suggested that it might have come from the Arsenio Hall show’s “woof woof woof” noises.

Q: Did you know that Amazon lists the publication date for your book as December 31, 1969?

A: Yes. Wish I could do something about it, too.

Q: Can’t I just send some money to you by PayPal instead of buying the book?

A: You don’t have to buy the book, but I’m not interested in tipjar payments. I’m not doing this to compete with my publisher. If you read the ebook and want to pay me back, but don’t have any use for the dead-tree edition, the best way you can do that is to buy a copy of the book and donate it to a school, library or community center. If you do this, you’ll put a copy of the book on the shelf where it might be read, I’ll get a royalty, and my sales-figures will go up (which means that I’ll get a bigger advance on my next book and my publisher will be more likely to want to repeat the experiment).