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cory doctorow
many copies of a book are distributed online or off.
Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
And finally, of course, there’s the matter of selling books. How-
ever an author earns her living from her words, printed or en-
coded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience.
There are more competitors for our attention than we can pos-
sibly reconcile, prioritize, or make sense of. Getting a book under
the right person’s nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and
most important task any writer faces.
I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was
lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted
to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have
three novels, a short story collection, and a nonfiction book out,
two more novels under contract, and another book in the works.
[BOOK COVERS] I’ve won a major award in my genre, science
fiction [CAMPBELL AWARD], and I’m nominated for another
one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]
I own a
lot
of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in stor-
age on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
LADDER]. I have to own them, since they’re the tools of my trade:
the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most
of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears from the
shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science fiction is
inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Comput-
ers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same
way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they
are malleable. Time was, a “book” was something produced by
many months’ labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of
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