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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 |
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
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
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
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.
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
pdflatex -- Processes LaTeX source into a pdf file. Neither slow nor painful :)
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
"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
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
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."
Really I thought the only place that I could buy a book was amazon.com
I'd be happy if award voters anywhere in the media world took the quality of a work into consideration.
--- Ban humanity.
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:[.]
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.
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
I didn't even know he stopped posting here. =)
You can specifically turn off stories from editors that piss you off. Katz was the first to go, followed closely by chrisd.
I wonder if you can block stories based on the appearance of specific strings in the titles. I, for one, would love to see a front page without stories whose titles contain the words "Groklaw", "SCO", "Microsoft" or "mp3 player."
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
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
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.
To be honest, I do consider "virii" a "real" word. It is an irregular plural form of the english word "virus". It just is not justified by latin language rules, but then again, it doesn't have to. I just pity the etymologists that wonder about the origins of this form in a few centuries - somehow I doubt that they will consider slashdot trolls and similarly stupid online publications as the real source, although they actually are.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.