The paperback of Little Brother is out, and it’s already started to attract some top honors. My publicist at Tor just sent the following::

* I am pleased to announce that LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow has been nominated for the 2011 Young Readers Choice Award, the oldest children’s choice award and sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Library Association (www.pnla.org).

*The New York Public Library’s “Books for the Teen Age” has been renamed “Stuff for the Teen Age” and as such LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow has made the list under the category “For Guys”.

* Nominated for the ALA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults 2011 list: Crime Scene Category:

Monday morning (volcano permitting!), I fly to the US for a tour to promote my latest book, the YA novel For the Win. I’ll be making stops in Chicago, Seattle, Portland OR, San Francisco/Palo Alto, Austin, Raleigh/Chapel Hill, New York and Toronto. Tor books has just put the schedule online — I hope to see you!

And yes, the book will be available as a free download, just as soon as I touch down in Chicago and get the site online. I’m also going to pop in at Forbidden Planet London this weekend and sign their stock before I go.

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

My latest Locus column, “Persistence Pays Parasites,” describes the process by which I fell prey to a phishing attack on Twitter, and how I learned (the hard way) that my threat-model for this kind of attack was flawed:

Here’s how I got fooled. On Monday, I unlocked my Nexus One phone, installing a new and more powerful version of the Android operating system that allowed me to do some neat tricks, like using the phone as a wireless modem on my laptop. In the process of reinstallation, I deleted all my stored passwords from the phone. I also had a couple of editorials come out that day, and did a couple of interviews, and generally emitted a pretty fair whack of information.

The next day, Tuesday, we were ten minutes late getting out of the house. My wife and I dropped my daughter off at the daycare, then hurried to our regular coffee shop to get take-outs before parting ways to go to our respective offices. Because we were a little late arriving, the line was longer than usual. My wife went off to read the free newspapers, I stood in the line. Bored, I opened up my phone fired up my freshly reinstalled Twitter client and saw that I had a direct message from an old friend in Seattle, someone I know through fandom. The message read “Is this you????” and was followed by one of those ubiquitous shortened URLs that consist of a domain and a short code, like this: http://owl.ly/iuefuew.

Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites

My latest Guardian column, “Viacom v YouTube is a microcosm of the entertainment industry,” examines the way that copyright law has encouraged Viacm to stop making and promoting programs in favor of making lawsuits:

Could it be that Viacom is suing YouTube for depriving it of revenue by allowing short clips from its properties to be viewed online, even as its production people are desperately trying to get as much of their video as possible on to YouTube?

I don’t think it would be that hard to understand.

What if Viacom’s frontline production people and even its mid-level execs have a theory about how to maximize shareholder value: they will produce things, make them well known, and stick ads on them to gain profits? They will seek out every conceivable opportunity to make their productions well-known, because though it may be hard to make money from popularity, it’s impossible to make money from obscurity.

What if Viacom’s senior execs have a different theory about how to maximize shareholder value: they will move against YouTube and other tech companies, using legal threats to extract maximum cash, even if this comes at the expense of popularity and income to the things that the company produces?

So if Levine is right, Viacom has two factions: one that wants to create and profit from television; and another that wants to create and profit from lawsuits.

Viacom v YouTube is a microcosm of the entertainment industry