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
buy character copy cut edit errors figure gives hand hours lay love novel online output page people post prefer printed promoting resulting return run second sharing simply spine turn willing work
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.
afford allow copies effort good hardcover living marketing means methods modern novelists possible print profit promote run selling tons tools year
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.
almost author became best book bought change classic earned household lost marketing meant people personal physical promotion pushing sales secrets seller sisterhood strength ya zero
is it any different to loaning a book to someone? There was a book in the US ( Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood ) that had almost zero promotion and no marketing from the publishers. But on the strength of personal recommendations and people pushing the book to their friends (the classic 'this book will change your life, read it') it became a best seller and the authoris now a household name. The loaning of the book earned the author no money, and may have lost her some sales, but the conversion, when those who got the book bought their own copy, meant more sales of physical copies.
affects deployed group learn opportunity success widely
DRM is already widely deployed without a hint of success and the NAVSHP group has the opportunity to learn from its well-known failures, ... NAVSHP should take a new look into how DRM affects the public, artists, and industry.
authors blogs encourage formed publish
Blogs encourage their authors to publish in small, partially formed chunks,
care food french great loved needs subject
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.
start
But this is just the start of something much bigger.
places reality surprising weirder
It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw.
almost amazing book decided ending finished great happen needed
I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.
diversity good less misses narrative species work
I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.
books both longer people skin
Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.
apology bad caught telling
What petulant jerks. Look, Sony, you got caught sleazing your customers' computers. Telling us that it wasn't so bad is just infuriating and insulting. An apology would have been better received.
answers bug copying cover digital good internet majority medium needs people reading realise screens text words
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.
large number seeing seemed suggest tells users yahoo
This seemed insanely limiting. So ... Yahoo tells me to deliberately keep a large number of users from seeing my pages, but won't even suggest a way to do this. Clever, huh?