"Cory Doctorow - Someone Comes to Town - Someone Leaves Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dodd Christina)

believing that your mobile phone will be the same thing as the phone attached to your wall, except in your
pocket. If you believe this sort of thing, you have no business writing sf, and you probably shouldn’t be
reading it either.

No, the business and social practice of ebooks will be way, way weirder than that. In fact, I believe that
it’s probably too weird for us to even imagine today, as the idea of today’s radio marketplace was
incomprehensible to the Vaudeville artists who accused the radio station owners of mass piracy for
playing music on the air. Those people just couldnot imagine a future in which audiences and playlists
were statistically sampled by a special “collection society” created by a Congressional anti-trust “consent
decree,” said society to hand out money collected from radio stations (who collected from soap
manufacturers and other advertisers), to compensate artists. It was inconceivably weird, and yet it made
the artists who embraced it rich as hell. The artists who demanded that radio juststop went broke, ended
up driving taxis, and were forgotten by history.

I know which example I intend to follow. Giving away books costs menothing, and actually makes me
money. But most importantly, it delivers the very best market-intelligence that I can get.

When you download my book, please: do weird and cool stuff with it. Imagine new things that books
are for, and do them. Use it in unlikely and surprising ways. Thentell me about it .Email me with that
precious market-intelligence about what electronic text is for, so that I can be the first writer to figure out
what the next writerly business model is. I’m an entrepreneur and I live and die by marketintel .

Some other writers have decided that their readers are thieves and pirates, and they devote countless
hours to systematically alienating their customers. These writers will go broke. Not me—I love you
people. Copy the hell out of this thing.

Medium Term

There may well be a time between the sunset of printed text and the appearance of robust models for
unfettered distribution of electronic text, an interregnum during which the fortunes of novelists follow
those of poets and playwrights and other ink-stained scribblers whose industries have cratered beneath
them.

When that happens, writerly income will come from incidental sources such as paid speaking
engagements and commissioned articles. No, it’s not “fair” that novelists who are good speakers will
have a better deal than novelists who aren’t, but neither was it fair that the era of radio gave a boost to
the career of artists who played well in the studios, nor that the age of downloading is giving a boost to
the careers of artists who play well live. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. I’man sf writer:
it’s my job to love the future.

My chances of landing speaking gigs, columns, paid assignments, and the rest of it are all contingent on
my public profile. The more people there are that have read and enjoyed my work, the more of these
gigs I’ll get. And giving away books increases your notoriety a whole lot more than clutching them to
your breast and damning the pirates.

So there you have it: I’m giving these books away to sell more books, to find out more about the market
and to increase my profile so that I can land speaking and columnist gigs. Not because I’m some
patchouli-scented, fuzzy-headed, “information wants to be free” info-hippie. I’m at it because I want to
fill my bathtub with money and rub my hands and laugh and laugh and laugh.
Developing nations