Cory Doctorow People Quotations

is it any different to loaning a book to someone? There was a book in the US ( Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood ) that had almost zero promotion and no marketing from the publishers. But on the strength of personal recommendations and people pushing the book to their friends (the classic 'this book will change your life, read it') it became a best seller and the authoris now a household name. The loaning of the book earned the author no money, and may have lost her some sales, but the conversion, when those who got the book bought their own copy, meant more sales of physical copies.

There are answers that cover the short, medium and long term. Everyone needs to realise that the thing the internet is good at is copying files, especially text files, between different locations. It is not a bug that needs cured, it doesn't need fixed, it's what makes the internet work. More people are reading more words from more screens everyday. It's not going to be long before the majority of text people read is in a digital format.

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.

Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, ... and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.

This is a fascinating phenomenon that evolved through the unexpected use of technology. It classically illustrates the way people find their own uses for technology.