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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"
...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
Hey !
I was reading the book!
Now the server's slashdotted!
Damnit
Is that a kind of cross between Coronation Street and Doctor Who
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
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
Why is this news for /.?
/.-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.
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
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
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.