I’ve just done the online checkin for my flight to Australia tomorrow for the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and the World Science Fiction Convention (also in Melbourne), so now seems like a good time to publish my schedule of appearances for the week that I’m there:

Melbourne Writers’ Festival:
Lecture, 1800h, Thursday, September 2, RMIT Capitol Theatre: Big Ideas: Copyright versus Creativity

(Note: the seminar announced for Sept 1 has been rescheduled; I’ll post here when I have the final info)

World Science Fiction Convention:
Border crossing: YA authors writing for adults and vice versa (Thursday, Sept 2, 1500h, Room 212)

Making a living: Professional writing for speculative fiction authors (Friday, Sept 3, 1200h, Room 219)

Copyright in the 21st Century (Saturday, Sept 4, 1000h, Room 203)

To market: How to sell your short stories (Saturday, Sept 4, 1100h, Room P3)

Did the future just arrive?: The e-book and the publishing industry (Saturday, Sept 4, 1300h, Room P3)

The writer and the audience: Online interaction and public personae (Saturday, Sept 4, 1500h Room 204)

Reading (Sunday, Sept 5, 1000h)

Kaffeeklatsch (Sunday, Sept 5, 1100h)

The future of short fiction (Monday, Sept 5, 1100h, Room 203

Dirty feed (Monday, Sept 5, 1200h, Room 210)

My August Publishers Weekly column reports in on my experiment to see which of the major ebook stores would carry my books without DRM, and with a text disclaimer at the beginning that released readers from the crazy, abusive license agreements that most of these stores demand as a condition of purchase. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM — even though my publisher and I both asked them to.

The upshot is that you can now buy electronic editions of my books in the Kindle, Nook and Kobo stores in DRM-free, EULA-free editions!

In May, I cornered Macmillan CEO John Sargent and CTO Fritz Foy at the Macmillan BEA party. As the publishers of my books with Tor, I asked them if they’d be willing to try offering my e-books to all the major online booksellers—Amazon’s Kindle store, Apple’s iPad store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, Sony’s e-book store, and Kobo—as DRM-free products with the following text inserted at the beginning of the file:

“If the seller of this electronic version has imposed contractual or technical restrictions on it such that you have difficulty reformatting or converting this book for use on another device or in another program, please visit http://craphound.com for alternate, open format versions, authorized by the copyright holder for this work, Cory Doctorow. While Cory Doctorow cannot release you from any contractual or other legal obligations to anyone else that you may have agreed to when purchasing this version, you have his blessing to do anything that is consistent with applicable copyright laws in your jurisdiction.”

As I explained to John and Fritz, although all my books are available as downloads for free, I often hear from readers who want to buy them, either because it is a simple way to compensate me (I also maintain a public list of schools and libraries who’ve solicited copies of my books so that grateful e-book readers can purchase and send a print copy to one of them, thus repaying my favor and doing a good deed at the same time) or because they like the no-hassle option of tapping on their device to buy a book. I am more than happy to offer my otherwise free books for sale in any vendor’s store, of course, but only if the vendors agree to carry them on terms I feel I can stand behind as an entrepreneur, as an artist, and as a moral actor.

Doctorow’s First Law

If you are reading this blog-post, it is because I have been kidnapped by my family and whisked away to a cottage on a Canadian lake, from which vantage I will be contemplating the loons, catching up on my reading, teaching Poesy to swim, going to the drive in, and lolling about in the grass or lazing on the dock.

Three things I will not be doing is looking at email, answering the phone, or blogging!

I’ll see you all again on August 29th — and if you’re in Australia, I hope to see you at the World Science Fiction Convention and Melbourne Writers Festival in early September.

Likewise, I hope to see my German friends on my September Little Brother tour, and my Dutch friends on my PICNIC and Bits of Freedom Makers launch.

(Image: more view, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from jtrant’s photostream)

A quick reminder: Canadian teens have one month left to vote for their favourite YA novels in Chapters/Indigo’s Best Canadian Reads series. You can vote every day, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that my latest novel, For the Win, is eligible for your vote!

I’m incredibly gratified to see Canada’s largest bookseller putting such a sustained, high-profile effort into promoting YA reading and YA literature. Please participate and show your support!

BEST CANADIAN READ NOMINEES

My latest Guardian column, “Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade,” looks at how a curated computing experiences (like the hand-picked apps in the Apple App Store and the Google Android Marketplace) offer undeniable value, but can be configured to be coercive traps or helpful starting points:

Two categories in particular won’t ever be fulfilled by a curator: first, the personal. No curator is likely to post pictures of my family, videos of my daughter, notes from my wife, stories I wrote in my adolescence that my mum’s recovered from a carton in the basement.

My own mediascape includes lots of this stuff, and it is every bit as compelling and fulfilling as the slickest, most artistic works that show up in the professional streams. I don’t care that the images are overexposed or badly framed, that the audio is poor quality, that I can barely read my 14-year-old self’s handwriting. The things I made with my own hands and the things that represent my relationships with my community and loved ones are critical to my identity, and I won’t trade them for anything.

Second, the tailored. I have loads of little scripts, programs, systems, files and such that make perfect sense to me, even though they’re far from elegant or perfect. There’s the script I use for resizing and uploading images to Boing Boing, the shelf I use to organise my to-be-read pile, the carefully-built mail rules that filter out spam and trolls and make sure I see the important stuff. I am a market of one: no one wants to make a commercial proposition out of filling my needs, and if they did, your average curator would be nuts to put something so tightly optimised for my needs into the public sphere, where it would be so much clutter. But again, these are the nuts and bolts that hold my life together and I can’t live without them.

Curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade