My latest Publishers Weekly column documenting my DIY short story collection With a Little Help has just gone up. It documents the first six weeks after publication — what went right and what went wrong. The good news is that I’m heavily in the black, thanks, in large part, to the limited edition hardcovers. The bad news is that the paperback sales have been really lacklustre — due to a too-high pricetag, lack of Amazon availability, and a paucity of reviews. Thankfully, these problems can be fixed — and as always, I’m letting future experimenters know how and where I went wrong so that they can avoid the pitfalls that caught me.

First, the good news: I’ve made a ton of money on the $275 limited edition. I’ve already sold more than 50, and I get a new order every day or two, without news or advertising. The recipients have been universally delighted with their purchases and the packaging. The combination of a cardboard book mailer, a section of burlap coffee sack, and acid-free tissue paper is a huge hit, with some customers even producing lavish “unboxing” YouTube videos and Flickr sets.

The typo-hunting project has also been a smash success. My readers have sent in 123 typos to date, about the same as I turned in for the second printing of my first story collection, which was proofed by my editor. With a Little Help was proofed by my mother, who routinely scores on par with professional proofers who do my novels. The number of reported typos has slowed to a tiny trickle, which tempts me to believe I may, in fact, perfect the text of this book, possibly a first in the history of publishing.

Now for the mistakes: first, the minor ones. I blithely assumed that I would spot all the errors without outside help, forgetting a key lesson I’d learned as a software developer. I was wrong. Turns out that I failed to notice that the e-mail addresses for reporting typos and requesting copies for libraries and schools were both malfunctioning. The former took less than a day to fix, but the latter took a month. I also failed to notice that my e-commerce system (the free WordPress eShop plug-in) was adding $15 shipping charges to orders of the hardcover. Thankfully, I noticed this about a day in, but I still had to send refunds to about 10 people who hadn’t noticed they’d been billed for $290 instead of $275.

I’m also unconvinced that having multiple covers was worth the effort. I love all four of the covers that I sourced for the book, but overwhelmingly my readers have chosen the Pablo Defendini cover, which incidentally is the only one without a real painting. What’s more, having four covers has geometrically multiplied the complexity of updating the text (to fix typos). Having done about 100 re-uploads of the source file to Lulu’s system—which is decidedly not optimized for editing your books several times a day—I’ve probably lost a good five hours to maintaining the separate editions. If I was starting over right now, I’d probably go with one cover, though I’d solicit several sketches and try them out on my Twitter followers to pick the best. But now that I have four covers I can’t see any reason to eliminate any of them.

With A Little Help: The Early Returns

My DIY short story collection With a Little Help is now available as a series of daily, one-page emails from DailyLit — all 151 installments’ worth!

My latest Guardian column is “Government data like crime maps is not enough – there needs to be action,” and it looks at two recent data-crunching apps for UK policing: first, the crime-maps that tell you what the crime’s like in your neighbourhood, and second, Sukey, an app that helps protesters evade police “kettling” — an inhumane form of arbitrary detention practiced by police.

When the citizenry need to build apps to protect themselves from unlawful detention by the police, it’s not surprising that a new application that allows you to go down to your local police station and ask them to do something about some newly transparent crime statistic is greeted with indifference or jeers. If you can’t trust the police not to detain your children on a freezing road for hours, why would you believe that you could have a productive dialogue about how they should be deploying their resources?

After all: tuition fee rises are a complete reversal of a critical Lib Dem pledge; mass NHS redundancies for nurses and other frontline workers are a complete reversal of a critical Tory pledge. When you’ve voted for a party that promises one thing and does the opposite, no amount of data about how rotten things are will inspire you to join a “big society” that works with the state to accomplish its aims.

Meanwhile, Sukey’s authors cleverly included a facility in their app that allows the police to communicate with demonstrators who are using it – an architecture for dialogue, built right in at the code level. If this was a “big society”, then the police would be using that channel to come to some accommodation with protestors that acknowledged the fundamental right to peaceful protest. But the radio silence to date tells us exactly why the crime map will serve no purpose: what good is it to know how your taxes are spent if you don’t believe that anyone will listen when you complain?

Government data like crime maps is not enough – there needs to be action

My critical review of Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion has been translated into French by the good folks at ReadWrite Web.

This March, the University of Toronto’s Faculty for Information is bringing me to Toronto to give a keynote at its Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference. Admission is free for U of T iSchool students. For others, the keynote is $5 at the door, or the whole event is $7 for non-U-of-T-students and $10 for the general public. The keynote is on March 5, from 5-7PM.

While I’m in town, I’m also doing a reading and signing on March 6 with David Nickle and Karl Schroeder for Chiaroscuro, at Augusta House at 152 Augusta Ave. The event runs 8-11PM, and is free.

Keynote at iSchool Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference
March 5, 5-7PM
University of Toronto Earth Sciences Centre, Bancroft Avenue
Details: iSchool

Reading with Karl Schroeder and David Nickle
March 6, 8-11PM
Augusta House, 152 Augusta Avenue
Details: Chiaroscuro

Thanks to reader Joe Lupe for creating the new favicon!

My latest Guardian column, “We need a serious critique of net activism,” is a long, detailed review of Evgeny Morozov’s new book The Net Delusion, a book that seeks to debunk “cyber-utopianism” and the idea that the Internet can be used as a force for freedom. I agree with much of what Morozov has to say, but his portrait of “cyber-utopians” consists of straw-men and caricatures, and he ignores the substantive, nuanced arguments about technology and freedom that technology activists have pursued for decades.

Though Morozov is correct in identifying inherent security risks in the use of the internet by dissidents, his technical analysis is badly flawed. In arguing, for example, that no technology is neutral, Morozov fails to identify one crucial characteristic of cryptographic systems: that it is vastly easier to scramble a message than it is to break the scrambling system and gain access to the message without the key.

Practically speaking, this means that poorly resourced individuals and groups with cheap, old computers are able to encipher their messages to an extent that they cannot be deciphered by all the secret police in the world, even if they employ every computer ever built in a gigantic, decades-long project to force the locks off the intercepted message. In this sense, at least, the technological deck is stacked in favour of dissidents – who have never before enjoyed the power to hide their communiques beyond the reach of secret police – over the state, who have always enjoyed the power to keep secrets from the people.

Morozov’s treatment of security suffers from further flaws. It is a truism among cryptographers that anyone can design a system so secure that he himself can’t think of a way of breaking it (this is sometimes called “Schneier’s Law” after cryptographer Bruce Schneier). This is why serious information security always involves widespread publication and peer-review of security systems. This approach is widely accepted to be the best, most effective means of identifying and shoring up defects in security technology.

And yet, when Morozov recounts the tale of Haystack, a trendy, putatively secure communications tool backed by the US state department that was later found to be completely insecure, he accepts at face value the Haystack creator’s statement that his tool was kept secret because he didn’t want to let Iranian authorities reverse-engineer its workings (real security tools work even if they have been reverse-engineered).

We need a serious critique of net activism

French translation: ReadWrite Web

I did a fun interview with School Libraries in Canada, a journal of the Canadian Association for School Libraries:

CD – I remember the first really substantial thing that happened to me in a school library. That was the day that they marched my grade three class down to the school library at Crestview Elementary and the school librarian explained the subject indices to us. It was like being led to a candy store; all of a sudden there was a key to all of the books on the shelves. I couldn’t have imagined this before. The potential made the blood rush in my ears. To be able to think of almost anything and go through that subject index and find those books was spectacular.

And then I worked at a number of school libraries. I spent one summer at a junior high in Toronto inputting the ISBN of every book in the entire collection as they moved from a card catalogue to their first digital catalogue. That was also kind of an education because a lot of the books pre-dated ISBN so I found myself looking at their Library of Congress numbers and starting to understand that there are multiple ways of organizing knowledge that suit different needs and that serve different audiences. I went from the revelation that there was one way to organize information, as was represented by the card catalogue, to the revelation that there was not one perfect way to do it. I think of it as like the David Weinberger revelation that everything is miscellaneous and that in fact what you really want to do is have lots of different ways to refer to and organize knowledge because any one way to do it is a constraint as much as it is an enabler.