Humanize the Earth!

Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow

I haven’t read Eastern Standard Tribe, by Cory Doctorow yet. I’m about to get started on it. I wanted to share a bit from the preface about art and copyright and all sorts of good stuff.

To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice—rip, mix and burn!—and that’s what I’m hoping you will do with this.Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you—the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers—hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

I’m unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a new practice of book, readers. Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks. Put it on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook formats. Show me—and my colleagues, and my publisher—what the future of book looks like.