I was interviewed for this excellent, thoughtful article on the future of the book in USA Today.

“I think book is a verb,” Doctorow says. It’s what you’re doing when reading something like a narrative story or biography or academic argument in big chunks in multiple sessions, he says. “We need to find ways to insert the verb of book into technologies that arrive,” Doctorow adds.

Doctorow admits he hasn’t yet learned a lot from his fans about what books can become. But there are some interesting hints. For instance, he’s certain that the free electronic copies are helping increase sales of hard copy books, which is the opposite of what publishers and authors fear.

“For almost every writer, the number of sales they lose because people never hear of their book is far larger than the sales they’d lose because people can get it for free online,” Doctorow says. “The biggest threat we face isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”

Next Saturday, I’m going to be speaking on a panel at the backstage.bbc.co.uk Open Tech 2005 conference in London. This is the successor to the NTK conferences like “The Festival of Inappropriate Technology” and “NotCon” — they’re always as fun as you can imagine, featuring everything from Bluetooth sniper-antennea fo synthesizers that you play by soldering and unsoldinering pins on the naked board to talks like the one I’m part of:

Where’s the British EFF?

Does the UK need a membership digital rights organisation? And if so, what cool-sounding acronyms haven’t already been taken?

Where: The Reynolds Building, St. Dunstan’s Road, Hammersmith, W6 8RP
(nearest tube stations: Hammersmith and Barons Court)

When: Saturday, 23 July, 11AM-6:45PM

£5 to attend — tickets are sold out, but cancellation tickets will be available at the door.

A bunch of great stuff was published about my latest book over the weekend, while I was off cavorting on a birthday holiday:

• This podcast with BlogTO.com
• Beloved San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll waxes rhapsodic about the book in his column
• Estado De S. Paulo, a Brazilian daily paper, has an interview with me about my use of the Creative Commons Developing Nations license (in Portuguese)

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on electronic book marketing, which talks about my experiments in making downloadable versions of my novel available.

Science-fiction novelist Cory Doctorow — whose books are published by Tor Books, an imprint of New York publisher Tom Doherty Associates LLC — has made his past two novels available as free downloads on his own Web site. His reasoning: As a relatively unknown author, he is worried more about getting readers familiar with his work than about how a free version might cut into sales. “My biggest business challenge is obscurity,” says Mr. Doctorow, who also writes for the tech-related blog Boing Boing. “The more freely my books flow, the better.”

Mr. Doctorow’s efforts have helped curry favor among his core audience of technophiles. Players of an online simulation game called Second Life have invited the author to a virtual book-signing event. They asked for Mr. Doctorow’s physical measurements and pictures of himself in his favorite clothes, which they used to design a virtual character for him. One player even created a virtual version of the book that Mr. Doctorow will be able to sign by clicking with his computer mouse. Mr. Doctorow points out that he hasn’t paid a cent for the publicity.

Canada’s THIS Magazine has published a great, immensely flatttering article about my writing and my work with EFF.

One central figure gets left out of this polarized version of the copyright wars: the artist. Putting aside the few vocal stars who have already made their millions, we seldom hear from actual creators. Enter Doctorow, guns drawn. “The copyright industry talks about how it needs to engage in further education of the general public so people understand more clearly what copyright does and doesn’t allow you to do,” he says. “If you need to understand copyright to listen to music or read a book, it’s like having to understand banking and securities law to withdraw five bucks for lunch. It’s nuts, and it tells you that the law has overreached.”

Doctorow’s answer? Give it away. And he does. More than 500,000 copies of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, have been downloaded for free from his website. In his view, free digital distribution allows authors to edge out the competition and acquire an audience. It seems to work. The paper run of Down and Out, published by Tor Books, sold 35,000.

Matt May, of the Staccato Music Podcast (a podcast focusing on Creative Content licensed material) has posted an interview with me about EFF and my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.