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.
dream delight
Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.
real damage-is-done giving
The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror... Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.
normal abnormal common
Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
garden perfect definitions
Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
technology giving privacy
This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
laptops deep-relationship knows
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.
men people safety
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
kids would-be littles
The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.
long cynical negative
If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.
fighting winning battle
We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.
fighting what-if lightning
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
math doors car
If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.