My latest Guardian column, “Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source,” explains why it makes sense for Wikipedians to insist that Roth’s claims about his novels be vetted by and published in the New Yorker before they can be included on Wikipedia:

Wikipedians not only have no way of deciding whether Philip Roth is an authority on Philip Roth, but even if they decided that he was, they have no way of knowing that the person claiming to be Philip Roth really is Philip Roth. And even if Wikipedians today decide that they believe that the PhilipRoth account belongs to the real Philip Roth, how will the Wikipdians 10 years from now know whether the editor who called himself PhilipRoth really was Philip Roth?

Wikipedia succeeds by “not doing the things that nobody ever thought of not doing”. Specifically, Wikipedia does not verify the identity or credentials of any of its editors. This would be a transcendentally difficult task for a project that is open to any participant, because verifying the identity claims of random strangers sitting at distant keyboards is time-consuming and expensive. If each user has to be vetted and validated, it’s not practical to admit anyone who wants to add a few words to a Wikipedia entry.

Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source

Charlie Stross and I are doing a public interview on The WELL’s Inkwell.vue conference — you don’t have to be a WELL member to ask questions, either! While I’m on the subject, Charlie and I are doing a live online Torchat tomorrow, Sept 19 at 16h Eastern/13h Pacific.

After a short delay, Charlie Stross and I have finally managed to get the site for our new novel, Rapture of the Nerds, live and online, including Creative Commons licensed ebook versions of the book. If you enjoy the free downloads, we hope you’ll buy a personal hardcopy at your local bookseller, or from your favorite online seller, or donate a copy to a library or school.

And if you’d like to reward us for our use of Creative Commons licenses, and reward Tor Books for its decision to drop DRM on all its ebooks, we hope you’ll buy an ebook at your favorite ebook retailer.

USA:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)

Google Books (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Apple iBooks (DRM-free)

Amazon

Booksense (will locate a store near you!)

Barnes and Noble

Powells

Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)

Kobo (DRM-free)

Chapters/Indigo

Amazon.ca

Rapture of the Nerds

Charlie Stross and I have a new book out and I’m about to put up a website were readers can download free, CC-licensed copies of it in ebook form. As with other recent books, I’m going to collect and publish the names of librarians, teachers, and public institutions that would like to get free copies of the hardcover, and then ask people who want to thank me for the free ebook by buying copies for these institutions.

So! If you’re a librarian, teacher, instructor, or similar, and you would like a free copy of Rapture of the Nerds for your institution, please send your name and the name and address of your institution to freerotnbook@gmail.com. I think we’ll launch the site early next week, and it’d be great to go live with a good, long list of potential donation recipients, so act quick! My assistant Olga Nunes (thanks, Olga!) is staffing that address and will get your listing up ASAP.

Note for teachers: this isn’t a young adult novel, and it deals with some decidedly adult themes and contains a lot of cussin’. Here’s the plot summary:

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth’s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth’s anthill, there’s Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.