Cory Doctorow’s brilliant novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is out today. Buy it early and often. Cory’s book is also the very first to be offered initially both for sale and under a CreativeCommons license. That means you can also download it for free. As Cory describes it,
“The entire text of my novel is available as a free download in a variety of standards-defined formats. No crappy DRM, no teasers, just the whole damned book.”
But as he (and I) expect, once you start the book, you’ll see you want it in its bound form. So again, you might as well buy it too.
Cory has been defending the rights of creators at EFF for sometime now. With this experiment, he is putting his money where his heart is. I’ve had enormous respect for him for a very long time, but I’m quickly discovering new heights of respect.
Congratulations, Cory, on a great novel, made available to the world freely — comments; and with great CC metadata to boot!
Check out the CC Weblog later today for an interview with Cory about the novel, and his ideas about licensing.
a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself