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

Interesting Business Model too...

[Transient0]

I've just published my first book with Insurgent Productions and the contract leaves me a whole lot of flexibility as per promotion and manipulation of the content.

[shameless plug]The book is for sale at frankduff.com[/shameless plug]

I am currently wrestling with the idea of releasing the full e-text. I intend to do so eventually, but am worried that if I do so in conjunction with the print release it might seriously affect sales, particularly since the website is one of my main retail points and the novel is short enough to reasonably read on a screen.

Good

[stjobe]

From the webpage:
I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for "Digital Rights Management" technology: [...] so I'm giving this novel to you in three open and flexible formats"

If you want to, go ahead and buy a copy and I'll get my royalty. But there's no obligation on you to buy it if you've read -- you're not ripping me off -- [...] I'm not in competition with my publisher here.

Good to see that there are a few authors and publishers out there that knows that giving away free downloads do not hurt sales -- if the book is good it will most likely sell more. (see Baen Free Library).

As for Doctorow, I enjoyed Down and Out, so I'll surely give this a try.

Curious to know

[Dark Paladin]

So just to be evil, how much money has Mr. Doctorow made from his books? In other words, has the experiment been "worth it", or does he have to do other things to supplant his income (aka "have a real job").

I just downloaded both, and plan to give them a read on Mr. Palm Pilot and if I like them, I'll probably buy Meatspace versions for family on holidays, but I'd be fascinated to see what the "download-to-purchase" ratio is.

It's the same kind of model we see in places like Megatokyo, Penny-Arcade, etc - free content with physical goods (books, T-shirts, posters, etc) being the actual income. Makes you wonder if Doctorow's endeavors are as successful, and if he should sell a T-shirt.