theinferior4+1 - VICTORIA Podcast

Funny, I'm writing a piece on The Turner Diaries for Clarkesworld, now. It'll run in December, and be what you said in one sentence, basically, only expanded to two thousand words so I can get paid.

I tried to read some of the Creative Commons version of Little Brother, but found the advertising and marketing placements in that version both incredibly irritating from any sane usability perspective and totally at odds with the presumptive theme of the book and the tone of Doctorow's philosophy in general over the decade or so I've been reading him. Then again, Doctorow's one of the zillions of geeks who have no problem justifying demands for Open Source Everything with true love of the most "closed source" company in the modern explosion of popular computing: Apple.

It was virtually unreadable, presumably intentionally so, so I'll be more likely to buy the physical book.

Since you liked it, I may actually borrow it from the library.

No, that's the thing - most Creative Commons releases are pretty much free of that sort of dickery. I created the CC release of Move Under Ground, for instance, for Nick Mamatas: the PDF version and the bare-bones site and HTML version here

http://moveunderground.org/

So...there are links to buy the book at the top of the web page, and the same info and links can be found at the end of the PDF. We probably could have put some branding and marketing material and those sales links into the front of the PDF, too, and gotten away with it, but we didn't. Copies of this PDF are not likely to sail wildly around the Interwebs, drumming up scads of new customers or visitors to Nick's site, after all, and ultimately, the point was to make this book available to read, for free, for real.

The CC versions of Little Brother, on the other hand, run almost a full five thousand words before they get to the book - Doctorow goes off on his love of open source everything, the political and social climate that inspired the book, Creative Commons licenses, then there's an ad for the audiobook and then there are fields of blurbs, and then you finally get to the book.

And every chapter is introduced by an ad for an independent bookstore Doctorow likes.

Most CC releases are more like Mamatas' than Doctorow's, thank god.

This is great, Paul. I vividly remember reading this story (the entire book )when it first came out -- I was on a train and must have been enroute to NYC from Boston, or maybe Iw as going to DC? I can't recall anything whatsoever about the trip except how utterly absorbed I was by "Victoria." Look forward to catching next 3 episodes!

Yes — in the last few years I've been doiing more readings, and I always notice stuff then that I don't see when I'm just revising onscreen or on page. Probably I should read an entire novel aloud to myself before publishing it, but .... that ain't gonna happen.

Cool, thanks.