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figure comes from my own attempt to do this — I’m sure that rip-
pers get faster with practice.)
I thought to myself that 80 hours’ free promotional effort
would be a good thing to have at my disposal when my books
entered the market. What if I gave my readers clean, canonical
electronic editions of my works, saving them the bother of rip-
ping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their
friends?
After all, it’s not like there’s any conceivable way to stop people
from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners
aren’t going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn’t
going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head
on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I’m
a science fiction writer — tuning into the future is supposed to be
my metier).
The timing couldn’t have been better. Just as my first novel
was being published, a new, high-tech project for promoting shar-
ing of creative works launched: the Creative Commons project
(CC). CC offers a set of tools that make it easy to mark works with
whatever freedoms the author wants to give away. CC launched
in 2003 and today, more than 160,000,000 works have been re-
leased under its licenses.
My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what
licenses it offers, and how to use them — but for now, check them
out online at creativecommons.org.
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