More news on the activist translations of Little Brother into Burmese languages: the activists at Digital Democracy who used Kickstarter to fund translations into several indigenous Burmese languages have released a set of covers, and they are made of win.
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Little Brother
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The US paperback of Little Brother just came out and is entering its second week on the National Independent Bestseller list! Thanks to everyone who supported the book — I’m over the moon!
Wesley Stroupe made this neat visualization of the tag cloud from Little Brother.
The paperback of Little Brother is out, and it’s already started to attract some top honors. My publicist at Tor just sent the following::
* I am pleased to announce that LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow has been nominated for the 2011 Young Readers Choice Award, the oldest children’s choice award and sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Library Association (www.pnla.org).
*The New York Public Library’s “Books for the Teen Age” has been renamed “Stuff for the Teen Age” and as such LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow has made the list under the category “For Guys”.
* Nominated for the ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults 2011 list: Crime Scene Category:
Jeannie Harrell, a student at Emerson College, was assigned to create a book jacket and interior for a course on book design. Because my novel Little Brother is available under a Creative Commons license, she was able to grab the text and do a new interior, as well as designing and publishing her own (outstanding!) cover. I really like what she came up with. Even if CC didn’t sell more books for me (which it seems to be doing!), I’d still use the licenses, because this kind of thing really, really makes me happy.
Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.
The American Library Association’s “Choose Privacy” week kicks off with a ~20 minute video featuring writers and thinkers talking about the value of privacy in simple, accessible, thought-provoking terms. Included are me, Neil Gaiman, and many others. Produced by Laura Zinger and 20K films, it’s a really fine little introduction to subject from the towering heroes of the information revolution: the librarians.
Ralph Amissah converted a couple of my books to his really exciting format SiSu. SiSu uses simple human-reabable markup and auto-creates several ebook formats, including PDFs, HTML, Docx, Epub, and plain old .txt (my fave!). I’ve really been looking for an easy way to “single-source” my books from manuscript to finished files, and this looks like a good candidate. Check out the conversions:
The SiSu converter is free/open and runs well on my Ubuntu Linux machine.
I’m delighted to announce that Little Brother is a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader’s Choice Award, “the oldest children’s choice award in the U.S. and Canada.” Not only that, it’s in stupendous company — be sure to follow the link and check out the list of nominees!
Argon Verlag, publishers of the German audiobook edition of my novel Little Brother, are fed up with all the man-the-barricades talk about audiobook piracy. So they commissioned a very high quality reading of the German text, read by Oliver Rohrbeck, a beloved German voice-actor (star of the long-running radio drama Die Drei ??? and overdub voice of Ben Stiller). The abridgement is being sold on six CDs for €19.95.
Fans of the abridged reading and everyone else who is interested in the audiobook are being asked to pay in towards a full, free, unabridged release, also read by Rohrbeck. Once the total of €9000 is raised, the unabridged recording will also be released, free of charge, without DRM, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, free for all comers (if the total sum isn’t raised by a set time, all the money is refunded).
What’s even cooler is that the audiobook (and the German print book, from Rowohlt), co-exist happily with a free fan-translation of the novel by Christian Wöhrl and a free fan audiobook reading by Fabian Neidhardt. Fans are free to promote the work to other fans, for free, while commercial operators produce commercial editions.
I’m going on a multi-city tour of Germany in September and I’m hoping to meet Christian and Fabian so that I can thank them in person. I’m also hoping that fans of the free editions support my cool, sharing-friendly German publishers and reward them for their open attitude towards free and paid media.
Tor Books, the US/Canada publisher, has two hundred advance copies of my next young adult novel, For the Win, available for free to young (19 or younger) gamers who are interested in reviewing the book on their blog or school paper. The book is about gamer kids all over the world who use multiplayer games to organize and fight back against abusive employers:
In the virtual future, you must organize to surviveAt any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.
Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.
The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.
Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation
If you’re under 19 and want a free early look at the book for review on your blog/paper/whatever, send a note with your address to torpublicity@tor.com with “FTW” for the subject-line. Also include the name of your blog or school paper. For fun, also share a game you enjoyed recently and why.
We did this with Little Brother a couple years back, on the grounds that books for young people should be available for young reviewers to write about, rather than adult reviewes who try to figure out whether young people will enjoy them. It was a real success and I’m happy to be repeating it.
This is being launched in honor of the American Library Association’s Teen Tech Week, and is open to Canadians and Americans. I’m working on a similar offer for the UK edition, for Britons, Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis, and will post about it as soon as I have details.
