My novel For the Win is the featured title this month at Readergirlz, a literacy site that does wonderful work. I’ll be answering questions there through the month.

My new Guardian column, “Ebooks: durability is a feature, not a bug,” is about HarperCollins’s decision to limit library checkouts of its ebooks to 26, whereupon the books self-destruct. I argue that it’s wrong to argue about whether print books last for more or less than 26 checkouts — the important thing to recognize is that the perishability of a print book is not a feature that we should seek to replicate in successive media.

Now, in point of fact, many ordinary trade books circulate far more than 26 times before they’re ready for the discard pile. If a group of untrained school kids working as part-time pages can keep a copy of the Toronto Star in readable shape for 30 days’ worth of several-times-per-day usage, then it’s certainly the case that the skilled gluepot ninjas working behind the counter at your local library can easily keep a book patched up and running around the course for a lot more than 26 circuits. Indeed, the HarperCollins editions of my own books are superb and robust examples of the bookbinder’s art (take note!), and judging from the comments of outraged librarians, it’s common for HarperCollins printed volumes to stay in circulation for a very long time indeed.

But this is the wrong thing to argue about. Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it’s bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article, to simulate the damage that might have been done by our careless patrons to the newsprint that had once borne it.

Ebooks: durability is a feature, not a bug

(Image: Library Microfilm Reader & Printer, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from cushinglibrary’s photostream)

This weekend, the University of Toronto’s Faculty for Information is bringing me to Toronto to give a keynote at its Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference. Admission is free for U of T iSchool students. For others, the keynote is $5 at the door, or the whole event is $7 for non-U-of-T-students and $10 for the general public. The keynote is on March 5, from 5-7PM.

While I’m in town, I’m also doing a reading and signing on March 6 with David Nickle and Karl Schroeder for Chiaroscuro, at Augusta House at 152 Augusta Ave. The event runs 8-11PM, and is free.

Keynote at iSchool Boundaries, Frontiers and Gatekeepers conference
March 5, 5-7PM
University of Toronto Earth Sciences Centre, Bancroft Avenue
Details: iSchool

Reading with Karl Schroeder and David Nickle
March 6, 8-11PM
Augusta House, 152 Augusta Avenue
Details: Chiaroscuro

My latest Locus column takes the form of a thought-experiment in which I try to make sense of how we treat creative work on behalf of a notional Martian:

It’s about this time that the Martian notices our distinctly contradictory relationship with copying. On the one hand, copying is inextricably tied up with this idea of ‘‘human progress’’ (itself the basis for venerating creativity). We copy the words invented by our ancestors. We copy the storytelling forms passed down to us by our literary forebears. Painters copy each others’ conventions and brushstrokes (not to mention mechanical techniques from gesso to frame-stretching). Filmmakers copy like crazy: everything from extreme wide shots to dollying in and out are techniques that were invented in living memory.

That matters, O Martian. Because generally, we frown less upon a copy when it builds on the work of someone long dead – especially when that person is anonymous. Not knowing which ingenious proto-linguist thought up the idea of a pronoun, we couldn’t possibly credit that part of speech to her. At a certain point, we stop treating each others’ creations and special pseudo-property (with all the legal and normative implications imposed by such a respect, from attribution to permission) and we start treating it as infrastructure – belonging to no one and everyone.

Infrastructure matters. Infrastructure forms the links of the chain from which we swing – someone invents language, someone invents storytelling, someone invents writing, someone invents type, someone invents publishing, someone invents trade publishing, someone invents science fiction, someone invents first contact stories, someone invents magazine columns, and then, I create this article you’re reading now. If I had to invent my own language and alphabet and commercial publishing industry before you I could claim to have created anything, I’d never get anything done, and all the magazines would be full of blank pages because all the writers would be so busy inventing their own private creative words that the articles wouldn’t get written.

Cory Doctorow: Explaining Creativity to a Martian

(Image: Martian Face 2, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 33942000@N00’s photostream)