Buy my novel Makers as a DRM-free download.

The Makers audiobook runs 18.5 hours and is formatted for burning onto 15 CDs. It’s read by Bernadette Dunne and produced by Random House Audio. I really like Dunne’s reading (here’s a sample) and RHA’s production job is tops. The MP3s are 128K/44KHz.

I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.

Right now, sales are only available through PayPal, though I hope that’ll change soon.

I’m pretty sure I just had a second day in Leipzig, but it’s a kind of blur. Some thoughts to record however:

* Cosplayers, cosplayers, cosplayers. Mr Jenkins to the white courtesy phone please, your meme is ready

* The Viennese coffee stand: I had to actually stop myself from going back because I’d drunk so goddamned much amazing coffee

* US consular folks: pretty nice

* Rohwolt’s CFO: pretty reasonable on the subject of free downloads!

* German press: Extremely sweet

* German sound guys: Tell you what: when I’m doing a reading and I get WAY close to the mic and speak WAY loud during a dramatic moment, I’m doing it for a REASON. It is not a call for you to turn the gain on my mic down so low I have to swallow it from then on in order to get any amplification. Work with me here.

* Leipzig airport only sells broadband in two increments: 1 hour and 30 days. Can you say screwjob? Danke T-Mobile, und get screwed.

It’s 1206AM in Germany and I’m ready to drop — left the flat in London at 0445 this morning to get to the Leipzig Book Fair and have had a high old time in my first of two days onsite.

Leipzig: pretty, in that particularly German way of mid-sized cities that have great swathes of cobbeldy wobbeldy old charming pedestrian streets that are nevertheless spotless and incredibly efficiently managed and fitted out. Too many of the same bloody high-street shops (the world doesn’t need more H&Ms), but a trip into a vast Conrad electronics shop to buy a plug adapter reminded me of the incredible and resilient German passion for making and fixing stuff. Something just wonderful about confronting whole walls full of locally made tools and parts for fixing the things in your house.

The fair: Young! Very young! Full of kids in cosplayer regalia, like some kind of existence proof of a Henry Jenkins essay! (Kids in manga outfits get in free). Discovered a motherlode of cosplayers in a “Japanese Tea Room” in hall 2, in the midst of a football-field-sized kawaii of anime booths (“kawaii” being the collective noun for anime booths, I am reliably assured).

So cool to see kids just totally in love with books and running around surrounded by them all day.

Lots of international pavilions. The former Yugo states have free booze at their pavilions and are swarmed. The US has Obama cardboard dollies and free pamphlets of Twain’s “The Awful German Language” in German and English. Canada didn’t show up at all.

There seems to be no WiFi, free or paid in the hall. FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL. Hey bookfair, a hint: when foreigners travel to your event, their phones’ data-plans don’t work. Which means that people here to do business need WiFi to stay in touch. Way to make publishing seem far behind the times. It’s 20-goddamned-10. You are a huge, bustling international event. Every last centimetre of your hall should be bathed in so much broadband that you get a sunburn if you stand still for too long. Christ.

The event: The Rohwolters have been lovely, and have shown me a good time. They took me and Michael — the translator for the .de Little Brother — down to a university hall where the public, critics, the press and 40-some schoolkids from a reading group met us. Michael read some of chapter three of LB, I read my traditional Delores Park concert scene. The Q&A afterwards was marvellous — the kids were sharp as tacks. Reminded me of the Berkeley High kids from the LB tour, hands-down the sharpest kids I met on that trip.

Dinner was lovely — delicious, with great conversations with my German audiobook publisher, who have incredible plans afoot for the LB audiobook.

Photos

In my latest Guardian column, “Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?”, I look at the last two weeks’ events in the life of the UK Digital Economy Bill, a piece of legislation tailor-made for the record industry at the expense of the public interest, freedom and due process. The question I can’t answer is, does the record industry put on these vastly over-reaching shows of power because they don’t care about backlash, or are they just so arrogant that they don’t imagine that there will be a backlash?

[T]he next day, Bridget Fox, a LibDem prospective parliamentary candidate who had spoken out against her party’s new pro-censorship stance, introduced an emergency motion to the LibDems’ spring conference. This motion called for the LibDems to follow a policy that puts internet freedom front and centre, categorically rejecting web censorship and disconnection of infringers and their families, and embracing net neutrality and all the other freedoms that you’d expect from the “party of liberty”. In other words, the LibDems had declared themselves to be not biddable by the entertainment industry, and indirectly but firmly rebuked the Lords who’d done the BPI’s dirty work for them.

By all accounts, the “debate” following Fox’s proposal was a one-sided affair. No one came forward to oppose it. Instead, for half an hour, speaker after speaker stood up to declare the importance of a free and open net. When the vote came, it was near-unanimous (I hear that there was one vote against the proposal). If the BPI had hoped to have an ally for the years to come in the LibDems, they blew it by asking for too much – and getting it. Their greed in exploiting their influence over the LibDem Lords galvanised the LibDem rank and file into enshrining a rejection of the BPI’s agenda into the party’s official policy.

Is the music industry trying to write the digital economy bill?

The folks at Shapeways surprised me in January with a 3D-printed version of the UK cover for my novel Makers, which had been designed by Shapeways community member Dmitry Kobzar. Mr Kobzar was good enough to release his 3D files under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license.

Now Shapeways is selling 3D prints of the cover for your delectation in a variety of materials (just in case you don’t have a 3D printer of your own with which to run off a copy!). For the record, I don’t get any of the proceeds from it — I just think it’s way cool.

Cory Doctorow Makers cover 3D print

Tor Books, the US/Canada publisher, has two hundred advance copies of my next young adult novel, For the Win, available for free to young (19 or younger) gamers who are interested in reviewing the book on their blog or school paper. The book is about gamer kids all over the world who use multiplayer games to organize and fight back against abusive employers:

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

If you’re under 19 and want a free early look at the book for review on your blog/paper/whatever, send a note with your address to torpublicity@tor.com with “FTW” for the subject-line. Also include the name of your blog or school paper. For fun, also share a game you enjoyed recently and why.

We did this with Little Brother a couple years back, on the grounds that books for young people should be available for young reviewers to write about, rather than just adult reviewers who try to figure out whether young people will enjoy them. It was a real success and I’m happy to be repeating it.

This is being launched in honor of the American Library Association’s Teen Tech Week, and is open to Canadians and Americans. I’m working on a similar offer for the UK edition, for Britons, Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis, and will post about it as soon as I have details.