Cory Doctorow: Little Brother

That’s changed! HarperCollins UK has bought the British rights to this book (along with my next young adult novel, FOR THE WIN), and they’re publishing it just a few months after the US edition, on November 17, 2008 (the day after I get back from my honeymoon!).

Update, November 27, 2008: And it’s on shelves now! The HarperCollins edition’s a knockout, too!

I’m so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because they’re finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because I’m raising a daughter here, dammit , and the surveillance and control mania in this country is starting to scare me bloodless. It seems like the entire police and governance system in Britain has fallen in love with DNA-swabbing, fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the off chance that someday you might do something wrong. In early 2008, the head of Scotland Yard seriously proposed taking DNA from five-year-olds who display “offending traits” because they’ll probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist.

America isn’t the only country that lost its mind this decade. Britain’s right there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds.

We need to be having this conversation all over the planet.

Want to get a copy in the UK? Sure thing!

My agent, Russell Galen (and his sub-agent Danny Baror) did an amazing job of pre-selling rights to Little Brother in many languages and formats. Here’s the list as of today (May 4, 2008). I’ll be updating it as more editions are sold, so feel free to grab another copy of this file (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there’s an edition you’re hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy all the currently shipping editions.

Audiobook from Random House. A condition of my deal with Random House is that they’re not allowed to release this on services that use “DRM” (Digital Rights Management) systems intended to control use and copying. That means that you won’t find this book on Audible or iTunes, because Audible refuses to sell books without DRM (even if the author and publisher don’t want DRM), and iTunes only carries Audible audiobooks. However, you can buy the MP3 file direct from RandomHouse or many other fine etailers, or through this link

My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of foreign editions: Greece: Pataki Russia: AST Publishing France: Universe Poche Norway: Det Norske Samlaget

No publication dates yet for these, but I’ll keep updating this file as more information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing list for more info.

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 Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that’s still only 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.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, “Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free — because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash.” Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they’d discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there’s no boundaries: I’ll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I’m a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they’re readers , they’re people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you’re one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you’re a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I’ve worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I’ve hung out in pirate ebook (“bookwarez”) places online. I’m a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It’s the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they’re weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would . The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it’s a feature, and a damned fine one. It’s embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It’s like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that’s feeding the world’s starving people because it’ll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that’s gonna be tricky, but let’s not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!