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!
All About:
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom
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).
I’ve done an interview on Minnesota Public Radio’s Future Tense, which will air shortly. Here’s a sneak preview of the piece.
If you attended last year’s World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, or pre-registered to attend this year’s convention in Toronto, you’re eligible to nominate (64K PDF) people, stories and books for the 2003 Hugo Awards. (Shameless plug: my stories 0wnz0red and Jury Service are both eligible in the Novella category)
(Thanks, Derryl!)
Review:
A K M Adam
Doctorow writes with a satisfying deftness, keeping his plot progressing at a an almost cinematic pace (indeed, the novel reads in some ways as a draft for a screenplay, although, regrettably, one can’t imagine the Disney corporation having the insight to permit such a movie to be made, more’s the pity). The periodic flashbacks don’t throw off the plot line’s advance; the hypothetical technology seems real and, largely, quite desirable (someone must encode a process for identifying Whuffie, now–speaking of which, whence comes that tag for online reputation?); the neologisms are generally transparent. Though the characters are drawn to be no rounder than the plot requires, they hold our interest and engage our sympathies in subtle ways. Most important, the ideas at stake drive the plot: What does it mean to have a particular identity? What makes an experience particularly moving or enjoyable? What makes Jules’s life meaningful? Doctorow propels readers through an amusement ride of meaning, leaving them exhilarated, tantalized, and eager for more.
He might well have supplied more without overextending the plot. Jules refers often to his days at the University of Toronto, and Doctorow might have offered a fuller picture of that critical phase of the radical social change that the whole book presupposes. Or he might have written out a longer ending, permitting readers to see how the year in Disney World affected Jules in the longer run. Still, one can’t complain about an author who opts to leave readers hungry for more rather than yawning for less. The streamlined narrative conveys part of the disburdened world Jules inhabits.
Critics are comparing Doctorow to Bruce Sterling, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson; what excites me about Doctorow is his capacity to work with ideas as Philip K. Dick did, but with significantly greater grace and elan. Compare Down and Out with We Can Build You, not only because both deal with animatronic presidents, but also because both provoke questions about what makes feelings “real,” about manipulation and coercion of assent, about what makes a life meaningful. You will see, I think, that Dick’s brooding brilliance does not overshadow Doctorow’s truer gift for narrative and composition; where Dick got there first, Doctorow makes more of the elements, more satisfactorily. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom breaks through not by virtue of being clever or portentous or literary or slick or even distinctively original, but by virtue of excelling at the job of writing vividly, lightly, about heavy topics–and such breakthroughs (like moving pictures, or flying steel) change things.
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.”
