Cory Doctorow Releases 'Eastern Standard Tribe'

OrenWolf writes "Cory Doctorow (of EFF and Boing Boing fame), has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe today.. it should be showing up in bookstores shortly. As with his earlier work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory has made the whole text of the novel available as a free download "in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license." Cory also has a writeup "explaining why I've done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I'd be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.""

Comments

Re:LaTeX fucking sucks

[Tirel]

Now you're just being silly. LaTeX is standard, it is used to typeset a large precentage of books and most scientific articles. It's advantage is that it is plain text and can be edited in any editor and it's superior rendering of mathematical equations/symbols. Trying to do those things in PDF means a slow and painful death.

Other sources of good books

[Togakure]

Baen Books deserves a mention for doing very similar to this. While not using the Creative Commons licence, what they have done is said "Here are the books in the free library, read as you will, if you loan it out to a friend that's fine." http://www.baen.com/library/ Believe me, some very good books in that listing, and some well written arguments in the Prime Palavar section of that site on why they've done what they've done.

Also Baen have their Webscriptions service. For US$10 or US$15, you can purchase a month's worth of books (5 to 6 books) for reading, downloading, whatever, or you can buy individual books for about US$5. Again, all in open formats (html, etc). There is no obligation to buy more at any time but I've found there is usually enough of interest that I've bought near on 30 months worth of subscriptions over time :)

Re:Interesting Business Model too...

[BigZaphod]

Cory released Down and Out online about the same time he released for print publication. From what I've seen it seems to have helped sales a bit. Then again, he got a lot of free press about it then, too, so that probably helped.

PDF is open

[Xoder]

I've said it several times PDF is an Open Specification.

There are several Free readers, such as GView, gv, xpdf, and so on. YES, even on Windows a Free reader is available (it's an add-on to GhostScript, find it yourself)

Complaining about PDF because of Acrobat is like complaining about HTML because of MSIE.

Re:LaTeX fucking sucks

[xoran99]

Trying to do those things in PDF means a slow and painful death

pdflatex -- Processes LaTeX source into a pdf file. Neither slow nor painful :)

How it actually works

[localroger]

I released my novel for free mainly because it was too edgy to attract the attention of a normal publisher and I was tired of letting it rot on my hard drive. I used a tip jar and published my experience with that.

Upshot? A review on slashdot was my biggest promotional score, and total readership appears to be about 10,000 worldwide. Tip jar revenue ended up a bit over $1,000. And despite many mails and posts telling me it was a very good novel, I still can't attract a publisher.

It just isn't as easy as it looks.

Unfortunately there was no POD publisher available at the time that had low setup fees. I lost much time trying for conventional publication again and now that it's available on dead trees from lulu.com the wave of interest has passed and I haven't sold many copies.

However, because of all the interest I am working on a sequel (which I'd have never considered before) and when it's ready I will introduce it online and via Lulu at the same time. Hopefully that will let the impulse shoppers grab a copy while it's fresh in their minds. It will be interesting to see how that works out.

TYPO in the cover

[peu]

What can you say about a book that has a typo in its cover?

Eastern Standard Tribe

by the uthor of Down and out the Magic Kingdom

Nevertheless, I enjoyed his 1st book.

Chalk up one lost sale

[__past__]

Right in one of the first paragraphs:

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

In the great slashdot tradition of getting fanatic about minor points, I outright refuse to buy a book that uses this stupid, just-plain-wrong pseudo-plural of virus! The proprietary, non-free license doesn't even allow me to release a fixed version of it!