February 04, 2004
Eastern Standard Tribe
Cory Doctorow has published his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Like his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory's made his book freely available for download under a Creative Commons License.
Cory has a write up of what he's trying to do:
The future is my business, more or less. I'm a science fiction writer. One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present. Here's a thing I've noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here's another thing I've noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn't mean that the book is dying -- no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying -- but it does mean that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive and well: we're reading our brains out! I just think that the complex social practice of "book" -- of which a bunch of paper pages between two covers is the mere expression -- is transforming and will transform further.
(The comments are also quite worth reading.)
Posted by leonard at February 4, 2004 11:21 PM
