Doctorow and Stross Release Latest Novels for Free

FleaPlus writes "Two prominent science fiction authors have recently released their newest novels as free downloads to coincide with their in-store releases. The first is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow. This is an unconventional story about an entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless mesh network, among other things. The second is Accelerando, by Charles Stross, which tells the tale of three generations of the Macx family (beginning with perptually-slashdotted venture altruist Manfred Macx) in the years leading up to and beyond a technological singularity."

Comments

great way to go

[genomicssheep]

I have just read the first few paragraphs of both, one book is perhaps not to my taste, the other has been added to my Amazon shopping cart. If more authors were to do this, then I am sure that many more of us whould while away our working hours discovering authors whom we really shouldn't. I prefer dead tree, but free-and-online is the *best* distraction in the office.

favorite doctorow pieces

[lennarth]

Let's spread the link-love!

0wnz0red is my favorite of Doctorow's. Some of his other short stories published on salon.com are Truncat, Anda's Game and Liberation Spectrum.

Also, slashdot has previously covered Cory in an O'Reilly interview and his take on DRM. There is, of course, more.

Stross is not no-name, troll

[billstewart]

Not sure whether to feed the trolls here, or what. Stross has had a bunch of short stories and a few novels published, and many of them have been shortlisted for Hugo or Sturgeon awards, but if you don't read British Scifi or his technical books or well-known scifi magazines, you may not have seen them. He's writing them for the purpose of writing them, though he may be releasing them this way to make a point (or to avoid dealing with traditional editors.)

Cory gets published a lot in his sets of circles, and while I find "sez" annoying, there's a lot of worse stylistication around.

Re:Can I redistribute them?

[charlie]

The "fine print" in each book is a standard creative commons license.

In the case of my own, I've picked no-derivs no-commercial; as long as you're not redistributing the book for profit or creating new works derived from it, I don't mind what you do.

Re:What about printing?

[charlie]

Yup, you can print the book out. It'll cost you as much as buying the hardcover and the result will be less pleasant to read, but you can do it.

You can give copies to other folks. The hitch is: you aren't allowed to sell it. Neither can the people you give it to. If you violate that part of the license, publishers' lawyers will come after you.

Again: you're only granted these rights for the book, as a book. You can't edit or remix it, or make a movie based on it, without asking me for permission. (Clue: I'm not hard to get in touch with.)

If you strip the internet out of the equation, basically you've got roughly equivalent rights to my book that you'd have to a book you borrowed from the public library -- except nobody's going to fine you if you're late returning it. Which is the whole idea of the exercise.

Re:What about printing?

[mouthbeef]

I've laid out Someone Comes to Town in two PDFs (one in A4 and one in Letter) that are optimized for very low-paper-consumption printing; if you have a duplexing printer, you can get my whole 300+ page novel onto fewer than 70 sheets and then side-staple them.

Many publishers are distributing advanced reading copies to blurbers, chain-buyers and reviewers in this format. I find it very convenient since it let me carry around a dozen copies of the book in the months before it was coming out to give to reviewers and blurbers I met in my travels.

By contrast, the traditional system for ARCs (still in use in the majority of cases) is to print and bind a softcover facilime of the edition for advance distribution to the trade. These "proofs" or "bound galleys" cost more than the hardcover to print (on a per-unit basis) and are in perpetually short supply -- it's heartbreaking to get an inquiry from a major newspaper or magazine for a review copy of your book before it's printed and to find out that all the ARCs have been distributed and there's no budget to print more. The low cost and nonexistent setup charges for printing galleys laid out like the PDFs I'm distributing means that your editor's assistant can just print off and staple together another galley whenever there's a demand.

Re:Stross totally rocks

[charlie]

Just in case you were wanting to read the first chapter of "Accelerando" without downloading the entire novel, I'd like to point out that Lobsters (as mentioned in the preceding post) is effectively the first draft of Chapter One.

Technological singularity

[TuringTest]

There's a SF world called Orion's Arm based on a post-singularity scenario.

It's collaboratively created and published with a Creative Commons license.

Just finished Someone Comes to Town

[DoorFrame]

I just finished reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town last night. (Good timing, eh?) Not only that, but I read the whole thing on a palm pilot for free with permission, which made me feel better than all the books I've read on the thing without permission. Anyway, it's pretty good, but I'd say Doctorow earlier works were stronger. The "unconventionalness" was sort of it never really seemed to get explained or justified. I guess that was probably the point, but I got to the end and felt like there was still more story that I missed out on. I guess I felt something similar at the ends of his previous novels as well, but they just seemed more self contained.

Anyway, check out Eastern Standard Tribe and his first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Both of these are also available for free download from the above linked sites.

Re:Good luck, suckers

[drsquare]

I wouldn't want to take $200 worth of fragile electronics to places where I read. Like at work, or in the garden, or wherever. Things like that get stolen, I can leave a book outside whilst I go inside to get something and if it's robbed (which it won't because people don't steal books, at least the ones I read), then it's only a few quid to replace it.

And it only takes one scratch or spillage or dropping to ruin that $200. A book can take all sorts of abuse, like months in the bottom of my bag. Yeah it'll be ragged but the writing will still be there, in nice high-dpi text, rather than jagged letters on a shitty LCD screen.

Books are much easier to read, in far more conditions, than even the best e-book reader. Also you're in complete control of the pages, rather than just pressing buttons, which psychologically is an important factor.

I for one don't trust computers, they're unreliable, bulky, expensive and over-engineered.

really retarded DRM...

[advocate_one]

Here... a classic example... upgrade acrobat and you find yourself locked out of those items that you've purchased...

Re:DRM

[pythorlh]

However, this is not necessarily true of the authors over at http://www.bean.com/library/. These authors release full books without any DRM, and most of them get boosts to their in-print book sales. Baen has even released several ISOs of CDs full of DRM-free versions of books Baen publishes. They put these CDs into some of their hard-cover books, and it helps sales. There is plenty of evidence that DRM free publishing creates wealth.