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=============== About this book ===============
This is my third novel, and as with my first, _Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom_ (http://craphound.com/down) and my second, _Eastern Standard
Tribe_ (http://craphound.com/est), I am releasing it for free on the
Internet the very same day that it ships to the stores. The books are
governed by Creative Commons licenses that permit their unlimited
noncommercial redistribution, which means that you're welcome to share
them with anyone you think will want to see them. In the words of Woody
Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for
a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our
permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a
dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it,
that's all we wanted to do."
Why do I do this? There are three reasons:
* Short Term
In the short term, I'm generating more sales of my printed books. Sure,
giving away ebooks displaces the occasional sale, when a downloader
reads the book and decides not to buy it. 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. Like I said in my essay, _Ebooks Neither E Nor Books_,
(http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt), digital and print
editions are intensely complimentary, so acquiring one increases your
need for the other. 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.
* Long Term
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 don't need to be a science fiction writer to
see the writing on the wall (or screen, as the case may be).
Now, if you've got a poor imagination, 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.
No, the business and social practice of ebooks will be way, way weirder
than that. In fact, I believe that it's probably too weird for us to
even imagine today, as the idea of today's radio marketplace was
incomprehensible to the Vaudeville artists who accused the radio station
owners of mass piracy for playing music on the air. Those people just
could *not* imagine a future in which audiences and playlists were
statistically sampled by a special "collection society" created by a
Congressional anti-trust "consent decree," said society to hand out
money collected from radio stations (who collected from soap
manufacturers and other advertisers), to compensate artists. It was
inconceivably weird, and yet it made the artists who embraced it rich as
hell. The artists who demanded that radio just *stop* went broke, ended
up driving taxis, and were forgotten by history.
I know which example I intend to follow. 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.
When you download my book, please: do weird and cool stuff with
it. Imagine new things that books are for, and do them. Use it in
unlikely and surprising ways. Then *tell me about it*. Email me
(doctorow@craphound.com) with that precious market-intelligence about
what electronic text is for, so that I can 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.
Some other writers have decided that their readers are thieves and
pirates, and they devote countless hours to systematically alienating
their customers. These writers will go broke. Not me -- I love you
people. Copy the hell out of this thing.
* Medium Term
There may well be a time between the sunset of printed text and the
appearance of robust models for unfettered distribution of electronic
text, an interregnum during which the fortunes of novelists follow those
of poets and playwrights and other ink-stained scribblers whose
industries have cratered beneath them.
When that happens, writerly income will come from incidental sources
such as paid speaking engagements and commissioned articles. No, it's
not "fair" that novelists who are good speakers will have a better deal
than novelists who aren't, but neither was it fair that the era of radio
gave a boost to the career of artists who played well in the studios,
nor that the age of downloading is giving a boost to the careers of
artists who play well live. Technology giveth and technology taketh
away. I'm an sf writer: it's my job to love the future.
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.
So there you have it: I'm giving these books away to sell more books, to
find out more about the market and to increase my profile so that I can
land speaking and columnist gigs. Not because I'm some
patchouli-scented, fuzzy-headed, "information wants to be free"
info-hippie. I'm at it because I want to fill my bathtub with money and
rub my hands and laugh and laugh and laugh.
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