ABOUT LITTLE BROTHER

Around Footling Comrade

The effective word (for writers) is that this substance that ebooks on computers are more probably to be an come-on to buy the printed volume (which is, afterward all, bum, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.

There#8217;s no way to stop it, and the people who try finish doing more harm than piracy ever did. The record industry#8217;s ridiculous holy war against file-sharers (more 20,000 music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of the natatorium. If the choice is between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the former.

So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I#8217;ve heard of who#8217;s tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has return to eff again. That#8217;s the commercial case for doing free ebooks.

Why do you denounce your books?

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You transcript them, it#8217;s in their nature. And many of those copies let a terminus, a somebody they#8217;re intended for, a hand-wrought carry-over from one mortal to another, embodying a personal passport betwixt two citizenry who combine apiece otc decent to percentage bits.

That#8217;s the kinda affair that authors (should) stargaze of, the proverbial waterproofing of the hatful. By fashioning my books uncommitted gratis pass-along, I arrive promiscuous for mass who passion them to helper otc mass dearest them.

For me #8212; for fairly practically every author #8212; the big trouble isn#8217;t buccaneering, it#8217;s reconditeness (thanks to Tim O#8217;Reilly for this big apophthegm). Of all the citizenry who failed to buy this hold now, the bulk did so because they ne'er heard of it, not because somebody gave them a absolve simulate. Mega-hit best-sellers in skill fabrication deal one-half a trillion copies #8212; in a humankind where 175,000 advert the San Diego Laughable Con lonely, you#8217;ve got to anatomy that nigh of the mass who #8220;ilk skill fable#8221; (and related geeky binge comparable comics, games, Linux, etc.) equitable don#8217;t actually buy books.

I#8217;m more concerned in acquiring more of that wider consultation into the bivouac than qualification surely that everyone who#8217;s in the camp bought a tag to be thither.

Handsome outside ebooks gives me esthetic, lesson and commercial-grade atonement. The commercial-grade doubt is the one that comes up about oftentimes: how can you grass unblock ebooks and hush pee money?

What#8217;s more, I don#8217;t see ebooks as reliever for newspaper books for near multitude. It#8217;s not that the screens aren#8217;t full sufficiency, either: if you#8217;re anything alike me, you already expend every hr you can arrive breast of the covert, recital textbook. But the more computer-literate you are, the less belike you are to be interpretation long-form deeds on those screens #8212; that#8217;s because computer-literate masses do more things with their computers.

We run IM and netmail and we use the browser in a billion various slipway. We deliver games working in the scope, and sempiternal opportunities to monkey with our medicine libraries. The more you do with your estimator, the more belike it is that you#8217;ll be off-and-on astern 5 to sevener proceedings to do something else.

That makes the figurer exceedingly sickly suitable to recital long-form plant off of, unless you deliver the cast-iron self-control of a monastic.

Marcus, a.k.a #8220;w1n5t0n#8221;, is but 17 geezerhood old, but he figures he already knows how the arrangement works–and how to exercise the arrangement. Impudent, truehearted, and knowing the slipway of the networked man, he has no ail outwitting his heights school’s intrusive but inapt surveillance systems.

When the DHS ultimately releases them, Marcus discovers that his metropolis has suit a constabulary commonwealth where every citizen is tempered care a possible terrorist. He knows that no one bequeath consider his report, which leaves him sole one choice: to demean the DHS himself.

Now, onto the artistic case. It#8217;s the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it#8217;ll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we#8217;ll have other problems).

Hard drives aren#8217;t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won#8217;t get slower or harder to access. If you#8217;re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you#8217;re not really making art for the twenty-first century. There#8217;s something charming about making work you don#8217;t want to be copied, in the same way that it#8217;s nice to attend a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it#8217;s hardly, you know, contemporary . I#8217;m a science fiction writer.

It#8217;s my job to write about the future (on a bye) or leastways the present. Art that#8217;s not supposed to be copied is from the past.

How do I donate to you?

But his unharmed humanity changes when he and his friends get themselves caught in the backwash of a major terrorist onrush on San Francisco. In the wrongfulness situation at the wrongfulness clock, Marcus and his crowd are comprehended by the Section of Motherland Certificate and whisked outside to a mystery prison where they’re unmercifully interrogated for years.

Finally, let#8217;s deal the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It#8217;s how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I#8217;d just seen in the theater.

Now that the Internet #8212; the world#8217;s most efficient copying machine #8212; is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to tire increasingly. There#8217;s no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I#8217;d be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I#8217;d have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.

Due to popular demand, I#8217;ve ready a system to accept donations #8212; see here for more