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

hear that?

[nil5]

I think I just heard Lawrence Lessig's battle cry: "Creative Commons? EAAAAAAAAARRRRGHHH"

News?

[pixelgeek]

Is this news or a promotional item for Cory's book?

Is this all it requires to get /. to advertise a product? Release it under the Creative Commons?

Re:News?

[iminplaya]

It also seems to "advertise" a process. So far it appears to be a good thing. Any alternative to the current copyright/patent quagmire that we are in now is good.

Re:News?

[OrenWolf]

Why is this news for /.?

Because it's from an author who, for the second time, is releasing his book under a "some rights reserved" license, for free, and this hasn't hurt past book sales.

Because it's a statement that DRM is *not* required in book sales.

And because it strikes at the heart of so many things /.-ers have been saying forever.. people will buy what they like, people will still be successful in selling a product even while giving away their product for free elsewhere.

Re:News?

[Eric Sharkey]

Is this all it requires to get /. to advertise a product? Release it under the Creative Commons?

No, you also need to have sufficient wuffie.

Who's to say...

[trickofperspective]

...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

F$%#

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey !
I was reading the book!
Now the server's slashdotted!
Damnit

Cory Doctorow

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a kind of cross between Coronation Street and Doctor Who

Mmmm logical thought

[Epyn]

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Like CD's/MP3's, or like diamonds

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Like CD's/MP3's, or like diamonds

[gl4ss]

dead tree versions have other advantages as well over pda's/mobile devices, like looking cool on your shelf and reminding yourself that they exist. Can't afford too many at the moment though, which is a shame.

that said, I read the latest harry potter last summer from the screen of a nokia 3650. and yes it was more convinient than the dead tree version(which of I have access to as well so it didn't really hurt any sales either), the paper version is unnecessary thick, so thick that it's not comfortable to read or carry around in travel luggage(in trains, busses& etc that I sat in a bit during the summer). that and the fact that the text would fit in a book that had half the pages if it was in different font, but it seems like it's thick for marketing purposes(and to justify greater price I suppose).

I also read a bunch of other books with it.. it was really handy since I whenever I had just a slight pause in what I was doing or was just having idle chatter with somebody I could just keep reading.

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 :)

Breakout Authors

[subjectstorm]

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.

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.

Creative Commons

[Linus Sixpack]

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

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.

Win Awards

[Nom du Keyboard]

Maybe an author who releases his work like this is improving his chances at relevant awards in his field (due to greater readership). This increases his value as a writer as well.

Maybe awards voters should take into consideration how much an author does to make his work freely available.

Learning from your mistakes

[bfg9000]

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.....