Cory Doctorow

I was chatting the other day about Cory Doctorow and I promised to blog it so people could read his books.

This is the guy who writes books for a living, but publishes them simultaneously in dead tree and electronic versions, obviously he makes money from his dead tree versions, but the electronic books are available for free on his web site. He feels that he can, and does, make money publishing this way, and it means you can read his work to get a feel for it, then choose if you want to buy the book or not.

He says he thinks that he has reached a wider audience this way, and that giving his work away like this actually increases his sales. His latest work Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town also has a very unusual extra bit to his license, where he allows people from countries not on the World Banks list of high-income countries to do more than just download and copy his book. You need to read the license to grasp what he means, but basically if someone from a developing world country wanted to make a commercial movie of his book, they could, they would owe him nothing, and they could possibly get quite rich from it.

I think it's cool, now all I need to do is write a novel.

It was a long dark night, and the man watching the house shuffled...

Nah, maybe later <G>