Ginger Coons did a great interview with me last week for Concordia’s paper The Link. Good meaty policy questions ahoy!

Enhanced Driver’s Licenses are being adopted in order to comply with newly-created American regulations on what constitutes an acceptable document for crossing the border. Doctorow did not view this as a sensible excuse.

“If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That’s not a basis for good governance.”

But it was not all doom-and-gloom from the sometimes-dystopian writer. Doctorow revealed that he had hope for the future of information policy.

“I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn’t have to explain why privacy is important or why neutral networks are important,” said Doctorow, who has pushed for Internet activity to be free from censorship or surveillance by Internet providers or governments. “I think if we got that, everything else would become easier.”

Here’s a mid-1980s CBC News scare-story about Dungeons and Dragons driving kids to suicide featuring (at 2:49 onwards) me and my classmates (the video is dated 1985, but I’m pretty sure this couldn’t have been later than my graduation from Junior High in 1984). Ignoring the crazy-ass fearmongering, it’s incredibly nostalgic to see all those kids I grew up with, playing with their minis and rolling their dice.

Dungeons & Dragons D&D Canadian Doc 1985 Part #2

(Thanks, Tim!)

Nice piece in today’s National Post about Makers and my approach to publishing:

Presently, Doctorow is in the midst of a short North American book tour promoting Makers, which, like all his work, is free to download from his website, craphound.com,under a Creative Commons licence, which allows readers to share and remix the work as long as it’s not for commercial purposes. Interestingly, Doctorow doesn’t accept payment from readers who’ve downloaded his book. Instead, he posts the addresses of libraries and schools who have requested the book and asks donors to buy them a copy instead. It’s his commitment and encouragement of sharing that makes Doctorow a thorn in the side of some in the publishing industry (though it should be noted his own publisher, Tor, is part of Macmillan, which in turn is a subsidiary of the massive German conglomerate Holtzbrinck). He wants his books to be read, he wants his books to be passed around and he wants his books to be copied.

“I copy, you copy, everybody copies. Pretending we don’t copy is just hypocrisy,” says Doctorow, whose own early attempts at sci-fiwere pastiches of Conan the Barbarian stories and Star Wars fan fiction. “It’s the 21st century: Art will be copied. If you’re making art not to be copied, you’re not making contemporary art. It’s lovely that someone wants to be the blacksmith at Pioneer Village, but that’s not my job. I’ma science-fiction writer.”

Copy fight

Hey, New Yorkers! I’m reading from and signing my new novel Makers tonight at the Borders in Columbus Circle at 59th Street, starting at 7PM. Hope to catch you there! Philadelphians, you’re next — Philadelphia Free Library on Friday, then Philcon (in Cherry Hill, NJ) over the weekend.

US/Canada Tour

Uitgeverij De Vliegende Hollander is the Dutch publisher for Little Brother, and they’ve really put a big push behind it. Unfortunately, they’re also locked into distributing their catalog as DRM-crippled ebooks through an online retailer that is the only major ebook vendor in the Netherlands.

But they’re good folks at my publisher, and they’re not fond of DRM either. When I asked them if there was some way we could sell the ebook without DRM, they told me that it was impossible (only one major ebook vendor, remember?), but would I mind if they just gave away the ebook in DRM-free ePub form?

Would I mind? That’s a dandy solution! Here’s a link to the free, DRM-free Dutch ePub version of Little Brother. Tell your (Dutch) friends, and be sure to stay clear of that infected DRM copy that’s being sold.

Little Brother ePub (DRM-free)

(Thanks, Rienk!)