Unabashed

I just finished reading Little Brother, and like just about everyone else who’s read it, I loved it. There’s been a lot of commentary about this book, and I agree with most of what I’ve read (especially this one), so I won’t add to it here. I’ll just say that this is a book people need to read. And it’s good. Really good.

Interestingly, I began reading the free PDF Cory posted on his website and liked it enough that by the time I was halfway through it went and bought the old hardback. Interesting the way that works, eh? Coincidentally, that’s exactly the way Doctorow legitimizes his tradition of posting free copies of his ebook, figuring that people don’t really like reading books on electronic devices, and if the reader likes the material they’ll go out and buy it (I know he thinks that way because he says so in the PDF’s introduction). Me, I didn’t buy it because I don’t like reading on an electronic device; I like reading ebooks on my Palm T|X or my Blackberry. I just bought it because it’s that good, I want my wife to read it, and I want it in my house for posterity’s sake. I want my children to read it one day. 

By the way, Little Brother is also a NY Times bestseller, so evidently giving away free copies of a book isn’t a death knell. It isn’t even a cold sore (Suck it, copyright proponents!). It would be interesting to know how many times a download led directly to a book sale.

Anyway, I look forward to more books like this from Cory. He’s already established as a great blogger and an activist for liberalizing copyright laws, and, though this isn’t his first book, it is his best, and it is the one that officially made him an author whose books I will buy from now on.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: author, authors, bestseller, copyright, Cory Doctorow, e-book, ebooks, little brother, piracy

From Cory Doctorow, quoting Matt Mason:

Pirates are out there figuring out all the ways that products and services might catch on, outside of the realm of the managed, slow-moving corporate environment. It turns out that there’s a market for DVDs sold on blankets on Canal Street; that the public likes using BitTorrent even if it starts slow and doesn’t stream; that there’s a bottomless appetite for short, embeddable clips, and that the audience wants to do all the work of selecting, converting, uploading and tagging them.

If you want to get rich off the pirates who are leeching off you, just copy their best ideas.

“The problem for artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Cory Doctorow, piracy