Free ebook/audiobook: With a Little Help by Cory Doctorow – Mad Marketing Skillz

Free ebook/audiobook: With a Little Help by Cory Doctorow – Grasping for the Wind:

"Cory Doctorow has just launched his self-published short story collection With a Little Help. The book is availble in paperback, super-limited hardcover, and audiobook for a fee. There are also free digital editions (including a free audiobook)."

Authors and indie publishers need to "pirate" Doctorow's marketing plans and start making some noize on the internet.
(Get it? All hip and young and new! Not your granddaddy's publishing plan.)

Google Book Search will never have an effective competitor - Boing Boing

Google Book Search will never have an effective competitor - Boing Boing:

"Let's be clear: I'm delighted that Google has figured out a way to bring back orphan works -- I just wish that the Authors Guild and Publishers' Association had the foresight to understand that vesting all this power with one firm (even one I admire as much as Google) was disastrous policy.

I also disagree with the idea that scanning books for the purpose of indexing them is illegal -- making a copy of a copyrighted work in order to generate an index is fair use, and it takes place billions of times every day, as search engines crawl the web (itself made up of largely copyrighted works), doing exactly that."

Google is doing everything in its power to become more powerful. The failure lies with the arrogance of the Authors Guild:

a collection of 10,000 writers who had the gall to negotiate this deal on behalf of every writer, living and dead, all over the world

The failure lies with the US legal system that thinks it has the right to rule on this issue.

E-book Rights Wrestling - Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper

E-book Rights Wrestling - Mall of Cthulhu by Seamus Cooper

Night Shade has stolen the ebook rights to The Mall of Cthulhu. They do not own them and are offering an electronic edition for sale through webscription.net, which is affiliated with Baen Books, a real publisher who should know better. Nine months ago, Night Shade made a verbal offer to pay me a small sum for the rights. I agreed. They’ve never paid me. They claimed their unauthorized edition was an oversight, and that was somewhat credible at the time. Nine months later, it’s clear that this is not an oversight. It’s a theft of my intellectual property.

I’ve given away the ebook of Mall of Cthulhu in hopes of cutting the legs out from Night Shade and webscription’s piracy of my work. (Guess what, Cory Doctorow? My problem is piracy and obscurity!) If you’d like a free electronic copy, scroll down here, or go to scribd. If you like it, please consider buying the Kindle edition, published by me and sold by Amazon, who pay me regularly for the copies I sell through them. (It’s only 3 bucks! Less than a latte!)

I find it interesting how empowering the new e-book market is for authors. If a print publisher screwed an author over on royalties and printed 100,000 books do you think that the author would go ahead and print and distribute the book on their own and give it away for free to "cut the legs out" from the publisher?

Apparently Night Shade and Cooper have reached an understanding and the royalty check is literally in the mail. The fact that Seamus Cooper (Brendan Halpin) can play hardball with the publisher in the marketplace, as well as getting public support and visibility from bloggers and fellow authors is indicative of the kind of publishing environment we'll see in the future.

Besides, a little controversy on the internets is never a bad thing. I've put the book on my reading list (I figure I'll have a little Cthulhu month-- read China Mieville's Kraken, and maybe re-read some H.P. Lovecraft.

Canadian Prime Minister to enact a Canadian DMCA in six weeks

Michael Geist reports that Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper promises to enact a Canadian version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act sometime in June. He is doing this despite any consensus within his inner circle, party, or the Canadian people. Harper is bowing to increasing pressure from the US.

Cory Doctorow reminds us of the overwhelming opposition to this same Conservative party position and the stupidity of being the first country to succumb to pressure from the US while an international treaty is in the works.

Speak out:

Write a paper letter to your Member of Parliament and send copies to the Prime Minister, Moore, Clement and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. No stamp is required - be sure to include your home address and send it to the House of Commons, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A6.

Bitter Seeds: A book I'd like to read soon

Positive reviews from Cory Doctorow (BITTER SEEDS: Alternate WWII novel pits English warlocks against Nazi X-Men), and John Scalzi (The Big Idea: Ian Tregillis) for Ian Tregillis's Bitter Seeds.

Bitter Seeds is an alternate history of WWII with Germany fielding a group of comic-book style supervillians and the British using warlocks and blood magick. It is the first book of a trilogy (Milkweed Triptych).

You can get the Prologue to the book at the author's website.

The iPad makes julienne fries

My favourite review of the new iPad tablet is by Cory Doctorow entitled Why I won't buy  an iPad (and don't think you should either). His first point is the most important and all his subsequent arguments reinforce it: Incumbents made bad revolutionaries. Apple has essentially modified the iPod a bit to lock more consumers into a restrictive marketplace of content and applications.

My favourite quote in Doctorow's article is in fact a reference to William Gibson's description of a "consumer" as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

The iPad is, in fact, not a product designed with consumers in mind, but designed to maximize the profits of corporate content providers. This is why there has been so much positive buzz about this product in the traditional media.

You know when something is fishy when someone reports that the lack of multitasking is a feature so that the user can concentrate on one thing at a time. Another article tried to claim that writing on an iPad is practical except he had to use an external bluetooth keyboard and a desktop PC to complete the experiment.

This is not a computer for people, its a product for sweaty potatoes.