page42
20
cory doctorow
the darknet. The only legit publishers with any success at epub-
lishing are the ones whose books cross the Internet without tech-
nological fetter: publishers like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who
are making some or all of their catalogs available in ASCII and
HTML and PDF.
The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-re-
stricted ebooks, they’re cratering. Sales measured in the tens,
sometimes the hundreds. Science fiction is a niche business, but
when you’re selling copies by the ten, that’s not even a business,
it’s a hobby.
Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more
and more words off of more and more screens every day through
most of your professional careers. It’s zero-sum: you’ve also been
reading fewer words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dino-
sauric executive who prints his email and dictates a reply to his
secretary is info-roadkill.
Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens
for every hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game
Boys until their eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their
hypertrophied, SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index
fingers.
Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap
printer-binderies, like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce
a full-bleed, four-color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound
book in ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books:
when you need an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or
part of one, and pitch it out when you’re done. I landed at SEA-
TAC on Monday and burned a couple CDs from my music collec-
tion to listen to in the rental car. When I drop the car off, I’ll leave
them behind. Who needs ’em?
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve
changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a
Content 2nd gal final.indd 20
7/4/08 9:56:28 AM