LITTLE BROTHER and Cory Doctorow on Giving Away Ebooks

Cory Doctorow is giving away his incredible YA novel LITTLE BROTHER. In a world dominated by Big Brother, it's the Little Brother's job to irritate, foil, and obfuscate.

And he's giving it away for free. You can get it here.

But more than that, I'm very impressed by his reasoning behind giving it away. As an author, it's quite thought provoking.

He says in the introduction:

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing. In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me for pretty much every writer the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Megahit bestsellers in science fiction sell half a million copies in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a handwrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free passalong, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.

What's more, I don't see ebooks as a substitute for paper books for most people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. But the more computerliterate you are, the less likely you are to be reading longform works on those screens that's because computerliterate people do more things with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading longform works off of, unless you have the iron selfdiscipline of a monk.

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper. So ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.