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

DRM

[md81544]

I love the section about DRM that Cory Doctorow has included in the preamble to the book:

DRM

The worst technology idea since the electrified nipple-clamp is "Digital Rights Management," a suite of voodoo products that are supposed to control what you do with information after you lawfully acquire it. When you buy a DVD abroad and can't watch it at home because it's from the wrong "region," that's DRM. When you buy a CD and it won't rip on your computer, that's DRM. When you buy an iTune and you can't loan it to a friend, that's DRM.

DRM doesn't work. Every file ever released with DRM locks on it is currently available for free download on the Internet. You don't need any special skills to break DRM these days: you just have to know how to search Google for the name of the work you're seeking.

No customer wants DRM. No one woke up this morning and said, "Damn, I wish there was a way to do less with my books, movies and music."

DRM can't control copying, but it can control competition. Apple can threaten to sue Real for making Realmedia players for the iPod on the grounds that Real had to break Apple DRM to accomplish this. The cartel that runs licensing for DVDs can block every new feature in DVDs in order to preserve its cushy business model (why is it that all you can do with a DVD you bought ten years ago is watch it, exactly what you could do with it then -- when you can take a CD you bought a decade ago and turn it into a ringtone, an MP3, karaoke, a mashup, or a file that you send to a friend?).

DRM is used to silence and even jail researchers who expose its flaws, thanks to laws like the US DMCA and Europe's EUCD.

In case there's any doubt: I hate DRM. There is no DRM on this book. None of the books you get from this site have DRM on them. If you get a DRMed ebook, I urge you to break the locks off it and convert it to something sensible like a text file.

If you want to read more about DRM, here's a talk I gave to Microsoft on the subject:

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

and here's a paper I wrote for the International Telecommunications Union about DRM and the developing world:

http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/itu_drm.php

Re:DRM

[Council]

As far as the young internet citizenry goes, I'm moderate to right-wing on DRM and data liberalization (I'm fairly left-wing in real life). This might not be the best label; what I mean is that while I like the ideas of free information, I think there's a lot of bias in the debate and blood in the water on both sides. I think there are decent points and stupiditiy on both sides, and I don't know that anyone really has a grasp on what this new world is going to look like. I'm in favor of not doing anything too rash and waiting to see how it plays out.

A few points worth keeping in mind:

There's a tendency around here to consider what can happen to the exclusion of what likely will happen. That is, just because there's a way to copy something doesn't mean enough people will go to the trouble to do so. There's no theoretical problem with copying paperbacks, but the average Joe doesn't have the time or the equipment, and most in the American system get their books from legal stores.

However, as with most parts of the debate, this digital revolution introduces a new twist: once something is broken, it can spread quickly. You don't have to re-break it for each copy. So you have a legal network and an illegal network sitting next to each other, struggling for supremacy.

I think what it comes down to is that people who want to control how easy it is to get to something can do so, but only by a matter of degree. It will always be possible to get an illegal copy of anything digital. But they can probably continue to make it difficult. This might be wrong, though; maybe there is no effective stranglehold that can be put on p2p traffic as bandwidth grows. Maybe file distribution systems will allow total anonymity for everyone in a more practical sense than Freenet. I'm not sure.

Let's try to look at the possible futures:

1. Total DRM failure:

KaZaA networks get better and better, cleaner and cleaner. DRM is cracked constantly and repeatedly struck down in court.

It seems that here there are still several possibilities.

1a. First: Total artistic anarchy. No average consumer pays money for videos or music. No one is forced to watch commercials in breaks in the shows. No one buys CDs. No one pays for their movies.

1a1. There are interesting lessons of history here that I don't know very much about and someone should go into in comments. We really might see a fading of big-budget media-creation enterprises. A lot of people don't think this would be so bad.

1a2. We might also see alternative payment methods arise. There's the idea that the market can handle anything. People will pay for what they want, one way or another. Concerts or patronages become the way artists make money.

1b. Second:

Artistic anarchy augmented by voluntary payment. People buy from iTunes or donate because they honestly want -- or are convinced by PR campaigns -- to support the artists they like. I think this is sort of wishful thinking. It might go for a while. But people don't like to spend money. Maybe this will blend into the 'patron' model, with a few rich people doing basically this.

1c. Third:

A tax supporting art.

This could happen.

2. Partial DRM failure:

What we have now. DRM and similar efforts makes it hard work to get stuff illegally, but easy enough. We continue with the current system, where there's a class of people who pays, for one reason or another (usually to avoid the difficulties and risks of illegal copying), and a large class that downloads whatever they want and pays for little. The system takes a hit but continues for quite some time. Then things get hazy.

Meanwhile, DRM is making a lot of problems for people who are just trying to move things player-to-player. People lose their music and get upset.

3. DRM general success:

Re:DRM

[LonghornBevo]

QUOTE from Cory Doctorow's talk to Microsoft's Research group about DRM : Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a speedbump!" Put your hand down. This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both bad for society, though.
Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted. ....
Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukranian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.
Wonderful article! Full text can be found at : http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Re:Good luck, suckers

[KDan]

Just you wait till e-paper comes of age... then you'll sit in a deck chair in the sun with a nice sheet of e-paper that can display more books than you can shake a stick at.

Daniel

Stross totally rocks

[billstewart]

Lobsters is a really really strange short story, and you should go read it, ideally online while sitting in your favorite pub. Singularity Skyis a novel exploring a post-Singularity world, nanotech, clashes of cultures, reaction to post-scarcity economics and human (and post-human) creativity. It's deep stuff, and simultaneously a fun read, and he's an interesting guy to talk to if you're ever on the correct coast of the correct continent or island.

I smell new business opportunities

[RAMMS EIN]

This is great! People publishing things outside the established copyright monopolies can only be a Good Thing. Now everyone can get the material in the format they want: electronic for the "paper is dead trees" crowd, and nicely bound for the "I prefer to sit outside and read a book" crowd.

Who's going to bind them? Well, that's where the new business opportunities come in. Small-scale production of books is wholly different from the large scale printing that is the norm nowadays. And as we lower the threshold to getting one's work published, I think we're in for seeing more and more interesting works appear. Printed GNU/Linux manuals, perhaps?

E-books in the bathtub? No thanks....

[billstewart]

I probably won't dig up a hard copy of the short story Lobsters, and I'll probably buy Iron Sunrise on dead trees before getting around to reading Accelerando online or in print. But Stross is a good writer, and book formats work better for longer works than e-books usually do, though back when I was commuting by train there were a number of books I read on my palm-pilot.

Kind of hollow...

[drewcaster]

I believe DRM is futile. However, it's real easy to release a 320 page book online as a protest about DRM when *nobody* wants to read a digital version or spend $80 to print it. Doctorow has little to risk by doing this.

When we have a large install base of portable ebook readers that are as easy to use as books (and as prolific as iPods) I'd be curious to see if Mr. Doctorow keeps giving digital ones away for free.

New Things?

[Matrix2110]

I am sorry people, but the likes of Cory Doctorow are beyond even the collective mind of /.

You academic types rave over Neil Stephenson while the people like Cory are doing far, far more to bring understanding to the common folk.

Cory is well grounded and hangs out with the like of Lawrence Lessing and that tart Xeni (NSFW) plus the other crew over at Boing-Boing.net

Good Stuff, fellow /.'ers .

My sig sucks, but it plays over a modem to this day.

Baen Free Library

[Bigman]

If you want DRM free sci-fi to read and or download, then try Baen Free Library. I've passed many a happy hour reading some excellent books there.
Eric Flint, an author and acting librarian for the above library, points out that sales of the in-print versions of some of his books actually went up after posting them for free in the online library. I read some of David Webers books there, and went out and bought them; despite the fact that the genre (space-opera) was not one I would usually go for. Eric points out in one of his articles on the site (Prime Palaver #1) that the biggest obstacle facing little known authors (and thats the vast majority of them) is their obscurity. Publish free on the internet, and people will read your books, tell their friends, and go on to buy the books you subsequently write. Perhaps that explains why sales go up when you give stuff away for free; I can't see how the same logic wouldn't apply to music.

Re:Don't want to sound cynical but

[mouthbeef]

"For starters why don't you go and scan his non downloadable books and place them on the internet and watch for the reaction."

Well, the last time it happened, I scanned it back in and re-released it under a CC license.

Re:Good luck, suckers

[FlopEJoe]

I agree a paper book is better.

But I also like to have over a hundred fiction and reference books, TV/Movie transcripts, opinion columns, and all my project's documentation on my Palm. I can grep for anything and annotate anywhere without writing (ruining) paper. I can read it anywhere and choose from any title in real time. On the bus, business trip, airport terminal, or waiting in line. No need to decide what books to take on a trip with limited luggage space. I don't know how many times in the Pre-Palm days when I chose the wrong books to take.

But that's just me.

Re:Okay, so dRM's bad, right...

[jurt1235]

I interviewed some of my friends who love to download, and I asked them when the price was low enough to start paying for pirated content: 0

Apparently some people will never be willing to pay for certain content. For myself I like it when I can decide if I like music enough to pay for it before buying. My reason to buy is, that I will listen more often to the CD and not just once. So what he does with the book is handy. Else I would have to read it in the store for a part (up to 5%, did that a lot with books, love Borders cafe), and then decide to buy it or not.

So there will be people who appreciate the other persons creativity and decide that they are willing to pay for it, others will borrow it at a library for stuff which they do not want to own (like listen once, read once (Ok, read most books only once anyway)), others decide that they do not want to pay for anything at all.
In the last category you also find the "crazy" collectors: They own thousands of songs & movies (and sometimes share those again), do not listen to all of them even once to check for quality, burn cd/dvd from it and just do not use it.

When I download something, I do not take care of it if it is not interesting, it will just get lost on my harddisk, gets erased at a reinstall, and I do not miss it. When I like it, I buy it, and store it nicely on a CD so I can use it again later.

Not just the famous authors

[jockm]

Unknown authors also release their novels free on the net. Then they use venues like Slashdot to help get the word out. For example, I am doing that just now. Oh wait, I've said too much...

OK that was shameless self promotion, and I'll not repent. But it is great that more established authors are out there doing this. It adds an air of legitimacy to all of us who are trying to use alternative means of publishing or promoting our works.

Thanks for posting that.

[PotatoHead]

Your actions, in that case, caused me to think a little deeper about this issue.

I've always been in your camp where DRM is concerned. However, I understand some subtle thing I'm not sure I did before.

Let me know if I have this right, because it's important:

In a world of interconnected people and computers, information flows more or less freely. It has to if the whole thing is going to actually be able to do anything of value to us.

I've got a work in the hopper right now. I think I'm going to do what you are doing, if I am lucky enough to see publication. I'm going to do it, not only because its the right thing to do, but its also the thing that makes the most sense.

In that world, you don't mind if your works are read by people you don't know because through them they can come to know you. For an author, that's a good thing all around. (As a budding author, I hope I can see similar success someday.) However, what you don't want is others making money from your work without your due compensation. Nobody works for free.

Your act was interesting in that the motivation for it is not obvious, I believe, to ordinary people at first glance. (I'm a geek, but I think I am ordinary for the most part.)

The media companies want to protect their ability to make money. They do this by using rule of law to deny others the ability to profit from their "works". However their actions come at a significant negative cost both financially and socially. This is why they have a dim view of "pirates" because they represent not only lost oppertunity costs but real expense costs as well.

However, you showed that you can still deny others the right to profit from your works while at the same time gain where they currently lose.

If the scanned text is officially available, why bother to get it from somewhere else? That's a very subtle way to compete with free and I am almost completely sure the big corps just don't get that. (Perhaps they will someday before we all lose our ability to compute freely.)

Not only is it good competition, but it's a bonus in that you have a chance to advocate your beliefs to them and suggest other works and express yourself personally all while denying the freeloaders their means to profit.

That's a world I can live in far easier than a one filled with draconian laws that make me feel dirty and used.