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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.