Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorowis a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics...
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth17 July 1971
CityToronto, Canada
world firsts first-time
Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
writing silence inner-peace
Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.
rooms return ethics
When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.
determination kids little-brother
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
empirical evidence free increases net points sales
What little empirical evidence is out there points to eBooks and free downloading increases sales on a net basis.
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There are answers that cover the short, medium and long term. Everyone needs to realise that the thing the internet is good at is copying files, especially text files, between different locations. It is not a bug that needs cured, it doesn't need fixed, it's what makes the internet work. More people are reading more words from more screens everyday. It's not going to be long before the majority of text people read is in a digital format.
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There are people already sharing eBooks out there, ... and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.
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Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the author's notebook but something amazing happens when you post them online. Readers help you connect them, flesh them out and grow them into fully-fledged books or blooks.
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It does the thing that all great non-fiction needs to do makes a subject interesting because of how it's covered, not because of the subject itself. I don't care about French food but I loved this book.
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if I want to enable my readers push copies to their friends, and they're in circles like Slashdot, Wired, Boing Boing, who never meet face to face, just online, well i need to give it to them in a suitable format so they can do whatever they need to do with it. SMS, MMS, Email, FTP, Cut and Paste, P2P, all are valid.
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The EU and the world are experiencing a revolution in creativity thanks to the Internet, ... An entire generation of remixers, talented amateurs, and Creative Commons enthusiasts have created works that do not require DRM to thrive. NAVSHP should produce recommendations for systems that embrace unrestricted distribution methods in support of these new Internet-native business models. These European creators deserve every bit as much attention from the EU as do American film studios and other incumbents.
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And it is promotion. My publisher, Tor Books, have some modern methods that allow them to make a profit on as little as 3,000 copies of a hardcover novel. The traditional methods would need a print run of 50,000 paperbacks. That means Tor can afford to have tons of first novelists every year on much shorter runs. But then the marketing effort is diluted to cover all those authors. It's not possible to make a good living from being a mid-tier author, just selling in the bookshops. I need to promote myself, with all the tools I have.