page95
GiviNG it away
73
year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of iden-
tity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the
books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in po-
litical arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and
jobs around them.
What’s more, science fiction’s early adopters defined the social
character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation be-
tween technical employment and science fiction reading, it was
inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet
would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter,
fannish organizing, publishing, and leisure are descended from sf
fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace,
it’s science fiction, the literature that coined the very word “cy-
berspace.”
Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated
literature online, through “bookwarez” channels that contained
books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to
digital text, and proof-read. Even today, the most widely pirated
literature online is sf.
Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As
publisher Tim O’Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, “Piracy is Pro-
gressive Taxation,” “being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a
crowning achievement.” I’d rather stake my future on a literature
that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a
form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century.
What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future,
electronic books will come to substitute more readily for print
books, due to changing audiences and improved technology. I am
skeptical of this — the codex format has endured for centuries
as a simple and elegant answer to the affordances demanded by
print, albeit for a relatively small fraction of the population. Most
people aren’t and will never be readers — but the people who are
Content 2nd gal final.indd 73
7/4/08 9:56:48 AM