Eastern Standard Tribe is cited as background reading for the upcoming Cyberspace Law Committee meeting at the American Bar Association 2004 Annual Meeting:

The passage below is from Cory’s latest book, Eastern Standard Tribe. It’s a fun romp. In an early part of the book, the protagonist has a car accident, and he finds himself in need of a lawyer. So, where does he turn? The chat room for his Tribe. (You’ll have to read the book to understand the Tribal references). The exchange below highlights many of the issues under discussin by the Cyberspace Law Committee, and that’s why I’m including this passage here. As you’ll see, he not only finds a lawyer, and forms an attorney client relationship, but he also gets certification of the lawyer’s credentials, reviews his standard representation agreement in “smartcontract” form, and executes it. All without leaving the chat room.

For those of you not familiar with chat rooms, you may initially be confused by the syntax. It’s probably easiest to treat this as if it were a script. Each line starts with the “handle” of the person who’s talking in the Chat Room. “Trepan” is the client/protagonist. “Junta” is the lawyer. I’ve edited the passage somewhat to focus your attention on the cyberspace law issues.

I’ve never seen Amazon do this before — they’ve got Eastern Standard Tribe on sale at a 60 percent discount — that’s $9.58 for the new hardcover! Hell, that’s less that I get ’em for.

The paperback edition of my novel Eastern Standard Tribe is in production, and my publisher has requested an errata sheet with collected typos, spelling errors, consistency problems, etc. Last year, William Gibson solicited message-board feedback from his readers to help him produce the errata sheet for the paperback of Pattern Recognition, but I wanna go one better, so I’ve put up a Wiki (a kind of web-page that anyone can edit) for anyone who’s got a favorite EST correction that s/he wants to see made in the next edition.

Changes are due by July 21 — thanks in advance!