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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.""
I think I just heard Lawrence Lessig's battle cry: "Creative Commons? EAAAAAAAAARRRRGHHH"
Why don't you do the conversion yourself? Cory merely provides the plaintext version... Other formats are put out by people who aren't lazy enough to whine about the absence of their favorite format.
blog |
I've run across his stuff in Asimov's and online and found it to be quite entertaining. He's really a good writer. Cool that he releases a lot of his stuff online for free, too. :-)
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Is this news or a promotional item for Cory's book?
/. to advertise a product? Release it under the Creative Commons?
Is this all it requires to get
...it worked really well? How can he track the correspondence between downloads and purchases and tell if one directly affected the other? It's hard to even say what those download statistics mean. I know I've downloaded the new book three times now, on multiple PCs, just to take a look at it.
As he points out, he doesn't have a first novel released in a non-e format to compare against. How would you go about deciding the correlation? Maybe if he included a coupon for the paper copy in the e format version?
-Trick
Let's just say I went to boingboing.net, and I consider that flagrant false advertising. Like that pottery store on the Simpsons called Stoner's Pot Palace.
Is this Open Source thing catching on? I have no idea where this is heading but this is surely a writer that is looking forward instead of backwards. I'm not sure Cory Doctorow knows what this will bring but is willing to take a chance - just as a visionary is supposed to. Is this the new revolution? Open Source code, Open Source books, the free flow of ideas and art throughout society. The revolution has started and it's free.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Hey !
I was reading the book!
Now the server's slashdotted!
Damnit
There's something about print books that I just love. They are simple to read (dont have to stare at a computer screen, or sit with 200 printed pages). Books are also great to collect, my bookcase is like my trophy case of all my literary accomplishments.
Is that a kind of cross between Coronation Street and Doctor Who
Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks
;)
I will suggest the next big worm writer to include it as a payload
*ducks*
Free XBox, PS2
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.
This is great, simply because I love it when people realize that consumers are willing to consume if they get what they pay for. I'm more than willing to pay for a book if I decide that I really like it. A reader might never have bought his work if they'd never read some of it online first.
Also, in my opinion its harder to concentrate reading off the screen that it is from a nice high quality 'physical artifact.'
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.
lysergically yours
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.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Jeez man...do you want frys with that?? How about if he comes to your house to read you a bedtime story? Need a faster computer? Maybe he'll buy one for you.
What?
My company's proxy server, in it's infinite wisdom, refuses to let me look at a site named "craphound". I wonder why?
There's an argument that as people listen to downloaded (stolen) MP3's, they'll be tempted to go to the shops and buy them, thus not depriving the shops of their cash or devaluing the commodity. I wonder how books will pan out.
If you could somehow get free diamonds, I doubt many of us would throw them away or buy them instead, (unless you're Dutch)
but with digital "objects" it's a bit more difficult to quantify. Copying is easy, delivery is easy. The sole advantage for the pay-for dead-tree-version is that you can cart it around with you - but with the advent of ever-more-clever phones, PDA's etc., will this advantage disappear, and with it, the open-source book ?
Interesting to see how it pans out...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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 :)
Thoughts influence feelings. Feelings influence thought. Choose your thoughts wisely.
Well, there is a .pdf provided...
.html and typeset that though --- either use xmltex or work up a script to convert it to LaTeX or your preferred style of TeX markup.
But it was apparently created in Microsoft Word running in Mac OS X.
The typesetting is also rather pedestrian... probably wouldn't be all that pleasant to read (and awkward to print since it's two up on a landscape letter-sized page)
Should be straightforward enough to take the
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Putting a book online for free is a great way for any would-be author to get his stuff read massively. It's just not a good way to get paid.
I don't think this is going to adversely affect the publishing industry much in the long run at all. If anything, it will keep it alive and help it to be more effective.
Here's an idea that works out for everybody:
Author Bob writes a book and puts it online. 100,000 people read it. Now they know who he is. A publisher looks at Bob's online work and sees that a lot of people read it. he doesn't have to advertise the guy now - people already know who he is. It takes the guesswork out. Now Bob gets contracted, sells his work instead of giving it away. Bob gets paid.
After a year or 6 months or something, bob releases the book online for free.
In the end, everybody wins. Bob gets paid, the publisher gets paid and saves on advertising and research, and the people can either buy the book or wait an uncomfortable period of time and get it free. most people would probably buy it.
Just an idea.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
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.
The previous sig has been removed due to
Its good to see an author re-using the creative commons. I've seen a bit of experiamentation with the license but this is the first author using this license for his _second_ book that I've seen.
Must mean it works for him.
LS
Being "mentally ill" and therefore poor, I tend to pirate books a lot. I like to read, I can't afford books, and going to the library can be both stressful and embarrassing. People like Cory make my day. I just downloaded both books and am about to start reading down and out. Again, Thanks!
pdflatex -- Processes LaTeX source into a pdf file. Neither slow nor painful :)
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
Actually, I do that as well and I don't see any problem with it.
In fact, I am rather surprised to see how far some people are willing to go in order to produce a manuscript in the publisher's format.
Isn't that supposed to be one of the few remaining publisher's duties? After all, most publishers require that you sign your copyright over to them and, for certain prestigious journals like Phys.Rev.Lett., you even have to pay to get your study published.
The owls are not what they seem
"I intend on figuring out the way that some writers--that this writer, right here, wearing my underwear--is going to get rich and famous from his craft. I intend on figuring out how this writer's words can become part of the social discourse, can be relevant in the way that literature at its best can be."
"I don't know what the future of book looks like. To figure it out, I'm doing some pretty basic science. I'm peering into this opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it sits in the year 2004, and I'm making a perturbation. I'm stirring the pot to see what surfaces, so that I can see if the system reveals itself to me any more thoroughly as it roils. Once that happens, maybe I'll be able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe--just maybe--I'll get to the bottom of book- in-2004 and beat the competition to making it work, and maybe I'll go home with all (or most) of the marbles."
It seems very much to me like he's interested in the future possibilities of publishing as art form and lucrative career... A very important part of the latter is the economics and relationships of publishing and e-publishing. I'm simply raising the obvious question of quantifying and comparing the data for discussion. Are there ingenious schemes anyone can think of to do so?
-Trick
... it's not?
You can download PDF format specs from Adobe's web site at no charge. You've got all the info you need to write your own PDF viewer. Hell, there are utilities such as pdf2ps that you can use to view PDF files in GhostView and such.
There's also PDF viewers for about everything that's capable of viewing them--PDAs, Windows/Mac, Linux, most flavors of UNIX.
Nathan
You can read a page or chapter of Cory's book, then buy it if you think it's worthwhile.
That's what I did when "Down and Out..." was put online, and the print copy was well worth the cost and effort in spite of the text being available online.
(Screw the publishers, let the authors promote their own shit, and let the public decide what will succeed. Same goes for music, fuck the RIAA.)
Read, L
The first book was great, havent gotten a glimpse of the second yet, but i'm eagerly awaiting the third "Up and Down on Space Mountain"
Sorry.. I just saw a Disney commercial.
Writes to PDF. The format is open and has been open for a long time.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
How to we congradulate him on releasing his second book? Of course by /.ing him. I guess I will have to download it later.
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
Uh, because there are multiple encoders for it including free ones, and because there are multiple readers across many platforms for it, including free ones maybe.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Install ghostscript and gsview (google the terms for links). gsview does require registration, but it is GNU s/w and even without registration you can use it fully, barring an annoying reminder which pops up every time you start it.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
The typesetting is also rather pedestrian...
Instead of complaining, why don't you take him up on his offer to provide additional (better) formatting. Then we all benefit!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Presumably, the author's income at the moment relies on people wanting paper copies or buying out of loyalty, gratitude, etc. But, Assuming that eventually all books are in an electronic format (e.g., someone makes a really good screen that opens up much like a book, and displays text in high quality on two pages, and is visually very similar to a paper copy (e.g., new polymer screens viewable from all angles)) what is the marketing position then for ebooks?
If you make books available for free, and people can put them on their book-readers and there is literally no advantage (other than a warm, fuzzy feeling) to buying the "paid-for" e-file, do you think people will still buy? I can't honestly say what I'd do - I'd like to think I would contribute to a book that I like, but if it's a choice between money or not, for no gain, well...It's a wonderful scheme for the readers, but the authors are going to be on the poor side.
Perhaps some sort of micropayment scheme? For large audiences, this could be effective - but you'd need an awful lot of readers to make a living! Or some other advantage to buying? If so, what?
Any thoughts on this?
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Maybe awards voters should take into consideration how much an author does to make his work freely available.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Error 42: Missing Question
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'd be happy if award voters anywhere in the media world took the quality of a work into consideration.
--- Ban humanity.
Slashdot ought to widen their story filters to allow filtering of "hacks who rip off more successful authors and/or talk about technology while having barely the slightest idea how it actually works". This way I can filter stories by Jon Katz and those submitted by/about Cory Doctorow.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
I wasn't complaining, merely commenting / observing and ammending my suggestion of the .pdf as being suitable to print.
.pdf is done distilling and who needs to get back to work ;)
I'd be more interested in providing a more nicely formatted version if it weren't such a crap shoot of ``first come first posted'' as opposed to the author making an attempt to discern which version is nicer (or arranging for a way for users to have a choice or vote on what they prefer) --- actually, I have been meaning to add some things to my portfolio, so will probably look into designing a layout for this to at least post on my own website, but that's not going to happen too quickly (have to finish up my paper for TUG2003 and finish editing the other papers before anything other than work is done by yours truly).
William
(whose
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
For those of you who own a Rocketbook-capable reader, I converted it over to RB format. I've sent it to him, but for now you can get it from my Page of Free eBooks. (Direct Link)
RinkRat
If you compile it for windows yourself, you can always disable the annoying reminder. :)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yesterday, Salon.com published a story by him titled "0wnz0red". Very interesting reading. Do check it out. You'll need to click through an ad to obtain a day pass to read the whole thing, but it's well worth it.
Wonderful. Not one post scored >= 3 actually talks about the content of the book.
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.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Emm, feels cool in the very first few lines...
I've d/l'd a couple of versions (see other posts for why) and started reading the first book, but just didn't find it that engaging, nor to have any new ideas.
Hasn't that story (future w/ immortal people who can do pretty much anything and are pretty much totally out-of-touch w/ the past) already been told in Roger Zelazny's _Elegy for Angels and Dogs_ (and reprised in Walter Jon Williams' sequel _The Graveyard Heart_)? (the twain were published as a Tor Double, but not in the way cool upside down / double book format since one was a sequel of the other).
I read through the first few pages of the other story, but just not finding much of interest there either.
Anyone want to reassure me that they're worth the effort to read, or warn me away from wasting any further time / effort?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Well, as a consumer I'm willing to pay for something I know I want, such as a book that I've started on online. Again, if I know I want to read the whole book, I'll want a valid physical copy. Hence the worth paying for.
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.
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
Right in one of the first paragraphs:
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!
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I did download the prior book, and read a bit of it. I decided it was absolute drivel, unreadable crap. The download saved me from wasting money buying it in print.
I wonder how many people might have bought this alleged novel but didn't because they didn't like what they read in the free version?
Could someone explain to me what the "uthor" mentioned on the cover of this new book is?
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.""
Actually, Cory, you'd be crazy to think the Slashdot Effect would skip you this time over. We never did before...
Basically, unless you write a book about "Ancient Roman Carpet Installation Techniques", we're gonna take you down. And even then, if you put it under the Creative Commons license.....
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Edgy is probably the wrong word for your book. Disgusting is probably much more appropriate.
And yet... I read it. The whole thing, cover-to-cover (well, virtual cover, anyway). The idea and implementation were compelling, and as you backed off over the second half and began to deal more with ramifications of a death-obsessed (well, virtual death-obsessed) society, I began to enjoy it more, and realized the graphic violence towards the start was necessary.
I ended up walking away after reading it, thinking "what a powerful novelette". It ranked right up there from the "changing the way I look at life" with The Bicentennial Man, Ender's Game, and the original Foundation trilogy. Even the preservation of life, taken to an extreme, can become an evil thing.
Yet it still grossed me out for the first half. And I wouldn't buy it in a dead-tree edition, simply because I wouldn't want my kids to touch it until they are at least 16 or so. Isn't that odd.
Oh, and back on-topic, I'm planning on reading Doctorow's book. So far, free musical content has caused me to purchase quite a few music albums I'd never have thought of otherwise, mostly from small local bands; I'm eager to see if it works the same way on me for books.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Damn, I put my novel up online for free but hardly anyone buys it! Maybe you have to have a famous web site, too...
For me, at least.
Now that the rah rah posts have run their course (open source! sharing! vive la revolution!) let me provide my point of view as a reader.
I would rather pay for a book (or check it out from a library) than download it for free.
I am happy to pay money for a book because I get a book. Along with the book comes the convenience of reading in bed, on the couch, on the train...pretty much anywhere there is light. Sure, an ebook reader would give me that (more if it's backlit, less if you read at the beach) but then there's the satisfaction of holding a book, flipping through the pages, smelling that new (or old) book smell. The physical book adds value to the text and is worth paying for.
Would authors sell more books if they gave away their first few books for free? Who can know? A lot of dot com companies tried to give away services in the hopes of converting free users into paying users, but I don't know if the same model applies.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Is he any relation to E.L. Doctrow, the late author of Ragtime?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
This is a big test and we'll see if it works. Giving away books has always been thought of as a horrible way to make a living. This "experiment" being carried out will give indications of the feasibility of "free" books...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Who Fucking Cares just released his latest title, This Isn't News, in a similar fashion.
Highly recommended read for /.-ers.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
In my opinion, the ideal model for the distribution of creative content is this: A creator creates the content (a writer writes a book, filmmakers make a movie, a musician records a song), then releases the content for free.
The public knows that creators have to eat, and so they know that if they like the work that a particular creator puts out, they should donate to that creator in order to encourage him, her, or them to continue producing things they like. If the creator doesn't receive enough donations due to his work, he may choose not to continue doing it (in favor of "regular" jobs). So it's in each reader/viewer/listener's interest to donate to the creators they like, since if they don't, there's a chance that those creators will decide it's not feasible to continue creating, and will stop, thus depriving the audience of further good artistic creations.
Karmically, you'd donate after experiencing a work, for as much as you think the work was worth to you. If you read Doctorow's new book and hated it, you'd probably donate nothing, and never again read one of his books. If you thought he had potential but didn't like this particular book, or simply wanted to reward him for his effort, you might donate a buck or two. Like the book reasonably well? Maybe five bucks. Think it's the greatest thing ever? The sky's the limit.
That's fundamentally it. The core idea is that since publically-disseminated information (like books, songs, and movies) cannot be controlled once published, fighting against it is wasteful and pointless. This isn't a new idea, nor is it originally my idea (I'm not positive but it's essentially a form of busking). Copyright was a nifty idea back when it was relatively difficult to copy large quantities of information like a book, movie, or song, but technology has changed and controlling it the way we do is no longer feasible.
There are practical issues, like the fact that some percentage of people will take in all the content they can without ever compensating the creators. But even they will eventually come to understand that if they don't contribute, and if enough people are like them, the creators will stop making their content. But we don't need laws to enforce this: it'll happen on its own. (And of course, creators could choose to sell copies of their works, if they wanted, in convenient formats; and I'm willing to bet that most people would still prefer to go to a store and buy a convenient copy of a movie or book or album, rather than dealing with getting a digital copy for free.)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
So is checking books out from the library.
Back before the internet, I sampled most books this way. I still own most of the ones I liked.
Because I *could* sample them first, I didn't buy the ones I didn't like, and had more money to spend on books I *did like*.
So what was your point again?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.