Cory Doctorow and Creative Distribution

1) All four of your novels are available for free online. Obviously a number of factors would have played a part in this decision. Do you think your motivation was primarily a “business” decision or a “political” one?

I voluntarily throw out some of the copyright that I get automatically just by writing stuff down. I do that for political and economic reasons: I think that the increased scope and duration of copyright are strangling free expression, privacy and innovation, and I think that enabling my fans to trade my words makes me more money. So I get to do the right thing and get paid, which is good.
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2) Was it easy to find a commercial publisher that supported your decision to make the books available online for free?

I’m generating more sales of my printed books. Sure, giving away ebooks displaces the occasional sale but it’s far more common for a reader to download the book, read some or all of it, and decide to buy the print edition. I’ve given away more than half a million digital copies of my award-winning first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and that sucker has blown through five print editions (yee-HAW!), so I’m not worried that giving away books is hurting my sales.
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Some day, though, paper books will all but go away. We’re already reading more words off of more screens every day and fewer words off of fewer pages every day.
You might think that we’ll enter that era with special purpose “ebook readers” that simulate the experience of carrying around “real” books, only digital. That’s like believing that your mobile phone will be the same thing as the phone attached to your wall, except in your pocket. If you believe this sort of thing, you have no business writing sf, and you probably shouldn’t be reading it either…
Giving away books costs me nothing, and actually makes me money. But most importantly, it delivers the very best market-intelligence that I can get. I can use this to be the first writer to figure out what the next writerly business model is. I’m an entrepreneur and I live and die by market intel.
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I think my editor at Tor was interested in experimenting with new business-models and was glad to have a writer that wanted to experiment too. After all, the changes in the publishing world will have just as profound an effect on Tor as they will on Tor’s individual authors.

3) As a form of self-promotion would you recommend CC to ambitious artists?

My chances of landing speaking gigs, columns, paid assignments, and the rest of it are all contingent on my public profile. The more people there are that have read and enjoyed my work, the more of these gigs I’ll get. And giving away books increases your notoriety a whole lot more than clutching them to your breast and damning the pirates.
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4) On the Openbusiness site there are lots of music business but only one model that even approaches publication of literature, and there are no art galleries listed at all.
• Do you think that an open system is better for music then literature/art?
• If not do you think you could explain this gap?

I think literature is going to turn increasingly towards online distribution and that this gap will close. Let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I’ve had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, “eBooks Suck Right Now,” and as funny as that is, I don’t think it’s true because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.

I haven’t come to a perfect understanding. I don’t know what the future of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I’ll share them with you:

1. Ebooks aren’t marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing,have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book — and the backlist.

2. Ebooks complement paper books. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better.

3. Unless you own the ebook, you don’t 0wn the book. I take the view that the book is a “practice” — a collection of social and economic and artistic activities — and not an “object.” Viewing the book as a “practice” instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of my books in a text-editor. From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF. I can turn them into an HTML file. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my
readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats

4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback’s original science
fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay…a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they’re not even insulting: they’re *quaint*and *historical*. Some writers do make it big, but they’re *rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere. The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled.

5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook’s distinctive value propositions — that is, the more you restrict a reader’s ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook — the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes.

6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). Artists are always disappointed by their audience’s attention-spans…Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren’t necessarily *shorter*.

7. We need *all* the ebooks. The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn’t mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution.

8. Ebooks are like paper books. To round out this talk, I’d like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books than you’d expect. There’s a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that’s the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs.
read more http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt

Click on the links to read more about Cory Doctorow, his work and his publicity.
www.craphound.com
Vauhini Vara, “Using Fiction to Sell Fiction”, Wall Street Journal Online.
Alex Aylett, “Copy That”, This Magazine.

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