In a very short time, I will be launching my self-published short-story collection, WITH A LITTLE HELP. This is a complicated beast: there’s a free ebook in several formats; the paperback is a print-on-demand that comes in four different covers; the hardcover is a super-premium item in a limited edition. There’s a free, downloadable audiobook, licensed for easy inclusion in your podcast feed; you can also buy the disc. You can donate cash to me, you can also donate copies to worthy institutions that are seeking same. If you report a typo, I’ll give you a footnote on that page, and I’m also releasing a monthly status update giving all my income and outgo. There’s also a gallery of hundreds of scans of paper ephemera donated by writer friends for inclusion in the limited-edition hardcover.

Since 2003, I’ve used the same template, with minor tweaks, for each of my book-sites; it was designed by the amazing Mena Trott for my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and great as it is, it’s not quite up to par for this.

Which is where you come in: I’m looking for a quick-and-handsome template that is identifiably of a piece with the rest of my sites, but accomodates four covers, the downloads, the audiobook, the limited hardcover, the special reports, the gallery of scanned ephemera, the two donation methods…

Got any ideas? Sketches? Send them along and if I use your design, I’ll trade you one of the first twenty limited-edition hardcovers to come off the press.

Here’s the video of my Melbourne Writers’ Festival talk from last week, “Copyright vs Creativity”:

Hey, Germans! Next Monday, I leave for a ten-day tour of Deutschland with the German edition of Little Brother. At my urging, my publisher Rowohlt has set an insane pace so that I get to as many places as possible. I’m coming to Hamburg, Braunschweig, Köln, Seeheim-Jugenheim, Erding and Göttingen.

I wrap up with two days in Amsterdam, where I’m appearing at Picnic and doing an event for the Bits of Freedom activist group, in honor of the launch for the Dutch edition of Makers.

Can’t wait to see you!

German tour schedule

My latest Locus Magazine column, “Proprietary Interest,” talks about the way that our instinctive ownership claims over the stuff we find and post to the Internet do more harm than good. When we claim that public domain images, interesting links, or other net-fodder are “ours,” we invite a muddle in which others make even more compelling ownership claims. For example, if the old public-domain Lysol ad you scan is “yours,” then why shouldn’t it be Lysol’s?. This is a world in which we spend all our time arguing about whose interest is most legitimate, instead of sharing, discussing, criticizing and enjoying the world around us.

Any ethical claim to ownership over a scan of a public domain work should be treated with utmost suspicion, not least because of all the people with stronger claims than the scanner! To be consistent with the ethical principle that one should never use another’s work without permission (regardless of the law or the public domain), every scanner would have a duty to ask, at the very least, the corporations whose products are advertised in these old chestnuts (the very best of them are for brands that persist to today, since these vividly illustrate the way that our world has changed – for example, see the very frank Lysol douche ad). For if scanning a work confers an ownership interest, then surely paying for the ad’s production offers an even more compelling claim!

And the publishers of the magazines and the newspapers – to scan is one thing, but what about the firm that paid to physically print the edition that we make the scan from? And then there are the copywriters and illustrators and their heirs – if scanning an ad confers a proprietary interest, then surely creating the ad should give rise to an even greater claim?

We do acknowledge these claims, at least a little. A good archivist notes the source. A good critic notes the creator. But that is the extent of the claim’s legitimacy. If we afford descendants and publishers and printers and commissioners their own little pocket of customary right-of-refusal over their works, we would eliminate the ability to keep these works alive in our culture. For these owed courtesies multiply geometrically – think of the challenge of getting all of Dickens’ or Twains’ far-flung heirs to grant permission to do anything with their ancestors’ works. What a lopsided world it would be if ten seconds’ scanner work with the public domain demanded 100 hours’ correspondence and permission-begging to be ‘‘polite!’’

Proprietary Interest

Canadians: Now that summer’s over, it’s your last chance to select your favorite young adult reads in Indigo’s summerlong Teen Read Awards. They’re soliciting Canadians’ daily votes for great books for teens to read, as part of a longer and larger promotion of teen reading and literacy. I’m honored to note that my latest young adult novel For the Win is in the final heat!

BEST CANADIAN READ NOMINEES