Tor.com’s Steven Raets has a great write up on WITH A LITTLE HELP:

As for the stories, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s novels will love them. Like his novels Little Brother, Makers and For the Win, they often start with a recognizable core: a present-day technological or sociological concept that Doctorow then pushes just a bit further than you could imagine, but in a way that’s so realistic and commonsensical that you’ll be considering “when” rather than “if” reality will catch up. Several of the stories play with one of Doctorow’s recurring themes: the relationship between information technology and personal freedom, with a special focus on privacy in the digital age. They range from hilarious (“Constitutional Crisis”) to deeply touching (“Visit the Sins”), and when Doctorow really gets going on how diminished our privacy has become (e.g. in “Scroogled”), they’re purely terrifying.

In this Clarkesworld interview, conducted last year during my tour for For the Win, Jeremy Jones and I talk about the rigors of touring, the politics of labor, and the elusive Drama Hobbit.

Have there been any strange moments?

There’ve been a couple pretty weird ones. I’ve had two funny misunderstandings. A friend of mine was interviewing me for the Guardian over Skype at six in the morning in San Francisco. It was later in the day for her, obviously, and luckily she’s a good friend. I forgot the camera was on and answered the phone naked. I’d been up since five but I hadn’t gotten dressed yet.

The other funny bit was when a guy came to my signing in Austin and I said, “What would you like in your book,” and he said, “Drama Hobbit.” I said, “Drama Hobbit?” And he said, “Yeah,” so I drew him the most dramatic Hobbit I could. I’m not much of a drawer and I said, “There you go!” And he said, “No, no, draw Muhammad.” Well, nobody knows what he looks like…

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