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

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.'

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.

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.