The awesome science fiction podcast StarShipSofa is the latest feed to roll in an excerpt from the Little Brother audiobook. If you’ve got a podcast and you want to excerpt some Little Brother audiobook, drop me a line!)
This week, as part of the book-tour for Little Brother, I sat down in Chicago with the guys from the Viking Youth Power Hour for an hour’s conversation and food — it was a great time!
I’ve been on my Little Brother book-tour for two days (doing school appearances around Chicago), and for the next two nights, I’ll be doing public events at Chicago area bookstores:
Tonight (Wednesday, May 14):
Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, IL
123 West Jefferson Avenue
Naperville, IL 60540
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
7:00 pm
Tomorrow (Thursday, May 15):
Barnes & Noble, Chicago, IL
1441 W. Webster Street
Chicago, IL 60614
Thursday, May 15, 2008
7:30 pm
Hope to see you there!
(Image: Little Brother Sketch, a concept for the Little Brother paperback cover art posted by Tor’s Assistant Mass-Market Art Director, Pablo Defendini)
I’ve been on my Little Brother book-tour for two days (doing school appearances around Chicago), and for the next two nights, I’ll be doing public events at Chicago area bookstores:
Tonight (Wednesday, May 14):
Anderson’s Bookshops, Naperville, IL
123 West Jefferson Avenue
Naperville, IL 60540
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
7:00 pm
Tomorrow (Thursday, May 15):
Barnes & Noble, Chicago, IL
1441 W. Webster Street
Chicago, IL 60614
Thursday, May 15, 2008
7:30 pm
Hope to see you there!
(Image: Little Brother Sketch, a concept for the Little Brother paperback cover art posted by Tor’s Assistant Mass-Market Art Director, Pablo Defendini)
Today on BBtv, I issued a challenge to Little Brother readers asking them to try out the Instructables HOWTOs that explain how to build the technology and projects in the book. We’re going to collect the best ones and feature them on future episodes of BBtv — the idea is to start a community of people who help each other make stuff that gives them more liberty and control over their lives. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Last week, I told you about my donations program for my new book, Little Brother. Every time I put a book online for free, I’m inundated by offers of cash “tips” from people who got the ebooks for free. I don’t want anyone’s money (cutting my publisher out of the loop isn’t good for them or me), so I came up with an alternative. I asked librarians and teachers who wanted free copies to step forward and put their names down, and now I’m looking for would-be “donors” to step forward and send them copies of the book.
The project’s been a smashing success so far: dozens of librarians, teachers and related trades put their names down for free copies, and we’ve started to fulfil the orders at a good clip. There’s plenty of open orders left, though — if you’re one of those people who wants to compensate me for the free ebook, here’s your chance!
Here’s the latest installment in Instructables’ series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young people who use homebrew technology to restore their civil liberties after a police crackdown on terrorism.
This week’s installment: What to do if the police stop you.
1. What you say to the police is always important. What you say can be used against you, and it can give the police an excuse to arrest you, especially if you badmouth a police officer.2. You must show your driver’s license and registration when stopped in a car. Otherwise, you don’t have to answer any questions if you are detained or arrested, with one important exception. The police may ask for your name if you have been properly detained, and you can be arrested in some states for refusing to give it. If you reasonably fear that your name is incriminating, you can claim the right to remain silent, which may be a defense in case you are arrested anyway.
3. You do not have to consent to any search of yourself, your car or your house. If you DO consent to a search, it can affect your rights later in court. If the police say they have a search warrant, ASK TO SEE IT.
4. Do not interfere with, or obstruct the police, as you you can be arrested for it.
Dan Bachelder bought the MP3 audiobook for Little Brother and decided that he’d rather listen to it in single-chapter chunks, delivered on a regular basis like a podcast. So he hacked up his own personal podcast, using free software to slice it up and serve it right into his podcatcher.
Best of all, he’s made the slicer-file available for others who’ve bought the audiobook and want to cut it into chapter-sized chunks.
bought the audio book (and hard cover) version of Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother. It’s delivered as a 163 megabyte MP3 file, over 11 hours of spoken word… I have listened to dozens of audio books delivered as podcasts, but I only have one “normal” audio book (The Areas Of My Expertise by John Hodgman… hilarious) which I bought through iTunes, it is broken into 3 (2.5 hour) parts, which is still a bit long for an “episode”. I really prefer the podcast episode per chapter form factor because it caters to my various neurosises and gives me a feeling of progress and accomplishment even when I don’t really deserve said feeling.
I listen to my podcasts in three places, my iPhone, my Apple TV, and through iTunes on my MacBook Pro (Holy fanboy, Batman). While the synchronization between the three is pretty good, it can mess up and lose my place in an audio file. This usually isn’t an issue because I rarely need more than a sitting to complete any particular file. I suspect that I’m not going to finish an 11+ hour audio book in a sitting… or even 11… so there is bound to be frustration and cursing as I lose my place repeatedly somewhere in the syncing madness.
After some Googling, I found AudioSlicer. In under 30 minutes I had the book split into 26 named sections, intro, chapters 1-21, epilogue, afterword, bibliography, and credits and copyrights. Here is my .split file (unzip it) which you can use with AudioSlicer to split the MP3 you purchase into the same chapters (if you have a mac). When you “Export Splitted” make sure “Filename Format” is “[trackNumber]_[title]_[album]_[artist]”.
Joshua Farber writes,
This afternoon, our school recieved a copy of Little Brother which was donated by a reader from Ridgefield, CT through the donation program. The Barnes and Noble “description” says:
“I saw your request on Cory’s site; I loved the book, I’m glad I could share.”
Bless you, benefactor. And Cory, bless you, too. I’ve been walking around glowing for over an hour, book in hand. When people (teachers and students) ask about my happiness, I tell them that socio-economic networking is the best thing ever. And then we get to talk about stuff that really matters. And we all get a little closer, and a little more knowledgable, and a LOT more excited.
Thanks for making my job work better, for making our school easier and more fun, for connecting us to you and vice versa, for making the world. Thanks to everyone else, too, for everything else. Whee!
Off to find just the right kid and slip the book into her hand — from there, I’ll ask the kids to pass it along virally until the end of the year, and then we’ll see where the book, the ideas, and the way it arrived here can take us.
Now that’s pretty freaking awesome.
Instructables has just posted its latest installment in its collection of HOWTOs inspired by my new novel Little Brother, a young adult book about hacker kids who use technology to win back their civil liberties from the Department of Homeland Security.
This week, it’s instructions for building a simple device that will let you spot hidden “pinhole” video cameras:
With one hand, hold up the toilet paper tube to your eye. With your other hand, hold up the flashlight at about eye level and point it away from you. With one eye, look through the tube and scan the room. If there are any small points of light bouncing back, inspect it further. It might be a camera.
