QotD for 31 Mar., 2009

On the brouhaha by some authors and publishers over copyright & ebooks in general, and Amazon's Kindle specifically:

Maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but the important thing is, we don't need new theories about copyright law to test the proposition. The existing, totally non-controversial aspect of copyright law that says, "Amazon can't publish and sell my book without my permission" covers the territory nicely. ---Cory Doctorow

Simple, huh ? Now, if Kindle books:

• Didn't have odious and burdensome DRM attached (so I could make decent backups),
  
• Didn't cost so bloomin' much (make 'em the price of a paperback minus a buck or so to make up for the lack of printing costs), and
  
• Were compatible with other ebook readers & software
  

then you'd really have something... But as it is ? Meh.

[via boing boing]

Book! It's Got an Intuitive, Touch-based Interface!

What with all the Kindle 2 release brouhaha, I got a real laugh out of yesterday's comic over at Penny Arcade. ;)

QotD for 2 Jan., 2009

Sol Short once told me that mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening and those who find it thrilling. He says the rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history. If change threatens you, you become conservative in self-defense. If change thrills you, you become liberal in self-liberation. He says the Threateneds are frequently more successful in the short run, because they always fight dirty. But in the long run, they always lose, because Thrilled people learn and thus accomplish more. ---Joel Johnston, lead character in Robert Heinlein & Spider Robinson's novel Variable Star

QotD for 30 Nov., 2008

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. ---Isaac Asimov, in The Foundation Trilogy

QotD for 17 July, 2008

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. ---Robert Heinlein

(/me waves and grins at his literary friends PJ and the Doxy ;)

Cory Doctorow on Free E-Books

There was quite a dust-up recently in the SF writers community when a VP of the SFWA sent a take-down notice to an e-text website and, in a rather bogus manner, invoked the DMCA. If you need background on the situation, author John Scalzi has a good summary.

However, one of the authors the SFWA VP claimed to represent is Cory Doctorow, who open sources all his fiction and lets anyone distribute and share it on a non-commercial basis. Doctorow has also "expressly forbidden SFWA from representing him in matters of copyright." (Scalzi article). This was not a smart move on the SFWA's part. Cory Doctorow has, in the hugely popular website/blog boingboing, one of the largest bully pulpits on the Internet and he's not afraid to use it.

Now Doctorow has published the thoughtful essay Free(konomic) E-books on the topic of giving away free, electronic copies of his works that is well worth reading:

Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.

Update: SF author Jerry Pournelle offers his take on this in his Sept. 4 column at Chaos Manor Reviews. He disagrees with Doctorow on a number of points, but you gotta give Pournelle props - he's been at this game a long time.

The Creature Lives!

Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy, has a new book out featuring my childhood's favorite campy swamp monster - The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Time's Black Lagoon is reviewed by Cory Doctorow on boingboing where he calls it:

funny, deeply weird, and action-packed...Di Filippo manages to cram every great tradition of the science fiction adventure novel into this one, giving it the feel of one of his baroque masterpieces...