Homeland
Cory Doctorow
A commercial interlude
As you read through this free ebook, you'll notice that it is dotted, here and there, with appreciations of great bookstores -- stores that I love, stores that have shown
me
love. As a former bookseller and a book hoarder for life, bookstores are my natural habitat. It's my hope that as you read this, you'll (ahem) bookmark these stores for regular visits and show them the love they deserve.
I've also dotted this ebook with "commercial interludes," in which I shamelessly pitch the commercial editions of this book. This, after all, is my living. It's how I feed my family. It's how I come to have the extraordinary privilege of sitting in an office all day, making up stories and putting them down in words, which is all I ever wanted to do, since I was six years old. This being the 21st century, there is no way I can force you to pay for this book before reading it -- you can get pretty much any ebook on the Internet for free with no more difficulty than you'd undergo if you were to buy it through legit channels -- so I hope that by giving you this, and trusting you, that you will reward me by helping to support me and my publisher (whose contribution to this book can't be overstated).
Now, perhaps you're thinking, "Hey, I don't really need a commercial ebook, and I don't want the print book -- can't I just say thank you some other way?" The answer to that is a resounding
yes
. As with my other recent books, I have assembled a list of librarians, teachers, and people from other public institutions who would like to get a free copy of Homeland for their kids and patrons. I pay an assistant, the wonderful Olga Nunes, to check out each of these people and ensure that they are who they say they are, and then we list them here:
If you want to tip me for this book, don't send me cash. Instead, send one of those institutions a copy of this book -- buy it from your local store and have it shipped, or buy it online -- and that way a bunch of kids will get access to it, and I'll get the sale credited to my name, which means bigger advances, bigger publicity budgets, and more foreign sales for me. It's a way to pay your debts forward in realtime, and it's pretty nifty (if I do say so myself).
(And I do)
Back to buying the book. This book is published by Tor Teen, and like all Tor books, all of its ebook editions are DRM-free. The hardcovers (and the paperbacks, when they ship) pay me a healthy royalty, and go to support a publisher that has poured huge amounts of money and time into making my books better and bringing them to the world. In other words, they're not just good books -- they're books that do good. Here's how you get yours:
USA:
Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook
(DRM-free)
Google Books
(DRM-free)
Kobo
Apple iBooks
(DRM-free)
Amazon
Indiebound
(will locate an independent store near you!)
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Booksamillion
Canada:
You don't have to buy the book from an online seller, either.
Here's a tool
that will find you independent stores in your area that have copies on their shelves.
This section is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.
This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. That means:
You are free:
Under the following conditions:
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link <
http://craphound.com/homeland
<
Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get our permission
More info here: <
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
<
See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
GOSH: London, England
London's GOSH doesn't even stock my books. They're strictly graphic novels. But what a
store
! They've got this absolutely choice corner store on Berwick Street, right in the middle of Soho, amidst the dirty bookstores, brothels, vintage vinyl stores, upscale dim sum places, and rad Australian coffee-houses. The store is
spacious
, having successfully resisted the comic-store-manager's traditional vice of piling stuff up and stacking it close to maximize the funnybooks and tchotchkes. Instead, it has this brilliantly
curated
look-and-feel, dominated by huge tables full of brilliantly hand-picked choices, and a basement full of oversized hardcovers and long-boxes full of old singles. You really couldn't ask for a better comic store in a better location.
The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.
I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of this book (which would put it in the top millionth of a percentile for novels), that's still only fifty or a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.
I
hate
the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just
stupid
to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a
license
to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.
Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament recently passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed in 2010 without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.
It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada negotiated secret copyright treaties called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) and "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) that have all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan was to agree to them in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless they do. In America, the plan was to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. ACTA began under Bush, but the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of TPP. The secret part of the plan failed -- ACTA ran into heavy opposition in Congress and has been rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament -- but the treaty isn't dead yet, and has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to bring it back under a new name. This is a bipartisan lunacy.
So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now. Just as this book is coming into print (February, 2013), the big American ISPs and big American entertainment companies are rolling out "six strikes" -- a voluntary plan to harass people accused, without proof, of downloading, and ultimately, to disconnect them from the net.
So, basically,
screw that
. Or, as the singer and American folk hero Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Most of my previous books have been released under a slightly different Creative Commons license, one that allowed for derivative works (that is, new creative works based on this one). Keen observers will have already noticed that this book is licensed "NoDerivs" -- that is, you can't make remixes without permission.
A word of explanation for this shift is in order. When I first started publishing under Creative Commons licenses, I had to carefully explain this to my editor and publisher at Tor Books. They were incredibly forward-looking and gave me permission to release the first-ever novel licensed under CC -- my debut novel
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(<
http://craphound.com/down/)
<. This ground-breaking step was only possible because I was able to have intense, personal discussions with my publisher.
My foreign rights agents are the inestimable Danny and Heather Baror, and collectively they have sold my books into literally dozens of countries and languages, helping to bring my work to places I couldn't have dreamed of reaching on my own. They subcontract for my agent Russell Galen, another inestimable personage without whom I would not have attained anything like the dizzy heights that I enjoy today. They attend large book fairs in cities like Frankfurt and Bologna in order to sell the foreign rights to my books, often negotiating with one of a few English-speakers at a foreign press, who then goes back and justifies her or his decisions to the rest of the company.
The point is that this is nothing like my initial Creative Commons discussion with Tor. That was me sitting down and making the case to editors I've known for years (my editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has known me since I was 17). My foreign rights are sold by a subcontractor of my representative to a representative of a press I've often never heard of, who then has to explain my publishing philosophy to people I've never met, using a language I don't speak.
This is hard.
Danny and Heather have asked -- not demanded, asked! -- that I consider publishing books under a NoDerivs license, so that I can consult with them before I authorize translations of my books. They want to be able to talk to potential foreign publishers about how this stuff works, to give me time to talk with them, to ease them into the idea, and to have the kind of extended conversation that helped me lead Tor into their decision all those years ago.
And I agreed. Free/open culture is something publishers need to be led to, not forced into. It's a long conversation that often runs contrary to their intuition and received wisdom. But no one gets into publishing to get rich. Working in the publishing industry is virtually a vow of poverty. The only reason to get into publishing is because you flat-out love books and want to make them happen. People work in publishing for the same reason writers write: they can't help themselves.
So I want to be able to have this conversation, personally, unhurriedly, one-to-one. I want to keep all the people involved in my books -- agents, subagents, foreign editors and their bosses -- in the loop on these discussions. I will always passionately advocate for CC licensing in
all
of my work. I promise you that if you write to me with a request for a noncommercial derivative use, that I will do everything in my power to see that it is authorized.
And in the meantime, I draw your attention to article 2 of all Creative Commons licenses:
Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection under copyright law or other applicable laws.
Strip away the legalese and what that says is, "Copyright gives you, the public, rights. Fair use is real.
De minimus
exemptions to copyright are real. You have the right to make
all sorts of uses
of
all
copyrighted works,
without
permission,
without
Creative Commons licenses.
Rights are like muscles. When you don't exercise them, they get flabby. Stop asking for stuff you can take without permission. Please!
Pandemonium: Cambridge, Mass
As you might expect, a town like Cambridge, Mass, is full of amazing nerdware purveyors. When you're in spitting distance of both MIT and Harvard, there is a hell of a built-in market for Cool Stuff. But sitting atop the mountain of geeky stores is Pandemonium Books, a comics/RPG/book store right on Mass Ave (they used to be in The Garage in Harvard Square, and their departure has left a huge hole in that space). There is practically nothing I like better than to start a walk at MIT (possibly with a stop at the MIT bookstore) and up Mass Ave, to Harvard, with a long, lingering stop at Pandemonium. There's always something going on there -- someone playing a tabletop game, trading Magic cards, or just talking animatedly about the kind of books I love.
