Quotes by Cory Doctorow

“If I am going to be a writer, earning a living in the era of digital text, I need to understand where the opportunities are. They wont disappear, theyll just be different, and need to be recognised. In the last days of Vaudeville Theatre, they sued Marconi because radio was killing Vaudeville, where you had to pay to go into a relatively small room to listen to music and voice. But it didnt kill music, the outcome was a thousand times more music, making a thousand times more money, reaching a thousand times more people. But in the short term, there was panic. If digital text will result in hundreds more authors, with hundreds more novels, I need to be in the middle of eBooks. I need to be heavily engaged. All those people downloading my text is good news.”

“[What is the new is the creative process involved in producing a blook.] Blogs encourage their authors to publish in small, partially formed chunks, ... Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the authors notebook but something amazing happens when you post them online: readers help you connect them, flesh them out and grow them into fully-fledged books or blooks.”

“Blooks differ from books in several ways”

“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 doesnt need fixed, its what makes the internet work. More people are reading more words from more screens everyday. Its not going to be long before the majority of text people read is in a digital format.”

“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.”

“Blogs encourage their authors to publish in small, partially formed chunks,”

“Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the authors notebook but something amazing happens when you post them online. Readers help you connect them, flesh them out and grow them into fully-fledged books or blooks.”

“But this is just the start of something much bigger.”

“There are people already sharing eBooks out there, ... and they do it simply because they love books. You dont 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 dont 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 Id prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.”

“And it is promotion. My publisher, Tor Books, have some modern methods that allow them to make a profit on as little as 3,000 copies of a hardcover novel. The traditional methods would need a print run of 50,000 paperbacks. That means Tor can afford to have tons of first novelists every year on much shorter runs. But then the marketing effort is diluted to cover all those authors. Its not possible to make a good living from being a mid-tier author, just selling in the bookshops. I need to promote myself, with all the tools I have.”

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Novels for me are how I find out whats going on in my own head. And so thats a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.

Whats the point of a houseful of books youve already read?

If you stare at someone long enough, theyll eventually look back at you.

Its our goddamed city! Its our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as were free. Once were not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! Youre young enough and stupid enough not to know that you cant possibly win, so youre the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

No, I mean Im sorry that youve inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where youve got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you dont get sick, where --

Every good thing comes to some kind of end, and then the really good things come to a beginning again.