Cory Doctorow Quotes (26 Quotes)

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

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.

The other one I did was "I, Robot." I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

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.

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

Finally, in the short term it's really obvious. People need to hear about my book, and if they've found out about it and buy it, I make money. The net cost of eBook distribution from my website is approaching zero. With half a million downloads of Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom , it doesn't matter if my conversion rate is a tiny percentage, it's still doing incredibly well in physical sales. The first print run of 10,000 was sold out in months, and so was the second print run. The hardcover was twice the size of a normal run, and it's on it's second run as we speak. The numbers are modest on the scale of the Internet, but that gives you an idea of what the stakes are in science fiction publication. To raise the stakes, you need to go outside the traditional realm. If I rely on just the bookstore sales, I won't make a living. Putting it online does not put my livelihood at risk, you make a living finding new ways to do business.

Has it been a success though, I ask. I don't know, ... I don't have another first novel that wasn't pushed electronically to compare it to. But the book itself is doing very well. Looking at other publishers, a good example is Baen Books , who do a lot of multi volume series of books. From experience, they know how much volume 13 should sell based on the sales of boook 12. So when volume 13 comes out, they bundled a CD-Rom with eBook versions of the first 12 books. They also hosted these eBooks online for free. When this happens, the sales of volume 13 were beyond expectation, and volumes 1 through 12 see a bump in sales as well.

If I am going to be a writer, earning a living in the era of digital text, I need to understand where the opportunities are. They won't disappear, they'll just be different, and need to be recognised. In the last days of Vaudeville Theatre, they sued Marconi because radio was killing Vaudeville, where you had to pay to go into a relatively small room to listen to music and voice. But it didn't kill music, the outcome was a thousand times more music, making a thousand times more money, reaching a thousand times more people. But in the short term, there was panic. If digital text will result in hundreds more authors, with hundreds more novels, I need to be in the middle of eBooks. I need to be heavily engaged. All those people downloading my text is good news.

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.

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.

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.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

This is a fascinating phenomenon that evolved through the unexpected use of technology. It classically illustrates the way people find their own uses for technology.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

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.

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.

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.

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.