Sejin Choi has translated my story Printcrime into Korean!
경찰들은 내가 여덟 살 때 아빠의 프린터를 박살냈다. 프린터가 뿜어내던 열기와 전자렌지에 식품 포장용 랩을 돌렸을 때 나는 것과 비슷한 그 냄새 그리고 아빠가 프린터에 신선한 찐득이를 채워 넣을 때 열중하던 모습, 프린터에서 갓 구워져 나온 물건의 감촉이 아직도 생생하다.
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Patricia Smith is a teacher of visually impaired students in Detroit’s public school system. She mailed me a copy of my YA novel Little Brother that she had run off her school’s Braille embosser and supplied to her students. She reports, “What I could not enclose is the gratitude from my Braille reading students. For various reasons, most books in Braille are aimed at younger children. My students are all between the ages of 12 and 15 and have no real interest in reading a Kindergarten level book. I was finally able to give them something interesting, compelling, and, most importantly at their grade level.” Patricia notes that she was able to do this only because the text of the novel is available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download (though US copyright law grants her the right to prepare a Braille edition of any book, the cost of doing so from a traditional printed book is prohibitive, and converting from a DRM-crippled ebook is technically difficult).
Patricia Smith is a teacher of visually impaired students in Detroit’s public school system. She mailed me a copy of my YA novel Little Brother that she had run off her school’s Braille embosser and supplied to her students. She reports, “What I could not enclose is the gratitude from my Braille reading students. For various reasons, most books in Braille are aimed at younger children. My students are all between the ages of 12 and 15 and have no real interest in reading a Kindergarten level book. I was finally able to give them something interesting, compelling, and, most importantly at their grade level.” Patricia notes that she was able to do this only because the text of the novel is available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download (though US copyright law grants her the right to prepare a Braille edition of any book, the cost of doing so from a traditional printed book is prohibitive, and converting from a DRM-crippled ebook is technically difficult).
@Halvais, a fan of my novel Little Brother, has set up a wiki-style site with the full text of the book for group annotation with links and commentary. Sweet!
@Halvais, a fan of my novel Little Brother, has set up a wiki-style site with the full text of the book for group annotation with links and commentary. Sweet!
Here’s some more pieces of that interview I did with the At Your Library folks on media literacy, activism and libraries.
The Robot Comics folks have been industriously converting my Creative Commons licensed IDW graphic novel, Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories adapted to comics form by an array of talented writers and editors) to a multiplicity of mobile phone platforms.
This is all under the auspices of the CC license and all the resulting comics are free — there’s stuff for Android, the Nintendo DSi, and the iPhone/iPod Touch (Apple finally caved and decided that the panel depicting an orc in a video-game being decapitated didn’t disqualify the comic of Anda’s Game from being included as a freebie in the iPhone store).
Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now reaches 60,000 downloads
Previously:
Here’s a transcript of an interview I did with Mur Lafferty at WorldCon on my WITH A LITTLE HELP project/stunt and various other writing things I’m up to:
CD: For the Win’s almost done. It’ll be, I think they’re saying May 2010? Or March, one or the other. A month that starts with an “m” and is in the spring of 2010, provided I can turn it in on time, which is like the end of this month, I’m a little late with it. They’ve given me a little extension. It’s coming along pretty well and it’s nearly done, I’m just writing the climax now. And I’m pretty excited with how it’s turned out.
ML: And that’s YA like Little Brother?
CD: Young adult novel, like Little Brother. It’s a book, as you know, about union organizers who use video games to evade the restrictions on labor organizing in the developing world and special economic zones, and who organize gamers, gold-farmers, who then go on to unionize factory girls and so on. And it uses this conceit to explain some macroeconomic, cognitive economic, and behavioral economic ideas, in the same way that Little Brother used its conceit to explain cryptography, security, statistics, and risk.
Here’s an interview I conducted with the At Your Library folks on the role of libraries in activism, media literacy, and Creative Commons.
My latest Guardian column, “Why free ebooks should be part of the plot for writers,” talks about how free ebook releases benefit well-known and obscure writers alike.
Releasing a book as a free download isn’t newsworthy in and of itself. It was, once upon a time, especially when that book had the backing of a major publisher. Publishers are often characterised as being conservative about the net, so it was surprising when it happened. These days, many writers have convinced their publishers to dip their toes in the water on this, and it’s simply not notable when it happens again.
Which is not to say that free downloads have no role when it comes to promotion, publicity and marketing. Their main effect is to magnify any good feeling your book has generated, by making it simple for people who love the book to get it under the nose of their social circle.
