Cory Doctorow | Carpool

Hello and welcome to another episode of Carpool, as you can see by the quality of the light. Either it's pretty late at night or it's very early in the morning. Well, let me reassure you. It's very early in the morning. I am on my way to pick up a passenger today and take him to the airport. He's going to the United States for a big science fiction convention and that could be a clue as to who the type of area he works in is. um ah, here we are. Come on, I'm getting real close, so please welcome him to the passenger seat, Mr.

Cory Dr. Well, let's go if you do the initial part, yes, yes, right and left will take you as you like. Oh, okay, no. I'll know where I'm from because that's where the gap is between my, you know, it's my generational gap. You know I grew up without computers and without computer games and as a kid, so just like that they. I have overlooked it. I've only found it too. I think there are three important Generations that were at least three important generational experiences of computers, which is the experience of becoming an adult before computers become part of daily life.

Getting to mid-childhood before computers become a part of daily life, which is my generation, there's kind of an almost clear delineation because once computers became available, they were so compelling to me and to many. from my colleagues who simply never ever. Come on, it became a kind of central feature of our lives, right, and then there's the third generation, which are people who have always had them, yeah, and you know, there's that classic formulation: everything invented before 18 was there forever. Anything invented after 18 is revolutionary and brilliant, anything invented after 30 should be banned, so when you were a little kid, even though your parents didn't have computers in your house, yeah, well, it started pretty early, my father was a computer scientist, so in 1977.

When I was six years old we had a teletype terminal, so you were very unusual and it was not even recognizable as a computer by standards, it was a device that connected to the telephone line and had a roll. of paper wow and it chattered and displayed text on the paper there was no um there was no screen yeah and you wrote on your keyboard and it appeared on the roll of paper and my mom was working in public primary schools, state schools and she could steal home big brown paper towel rolls from the bathroom and then we pass them in One Direction and then we turn them around and pass them in the other direction, I mean, it's quite, it's quite funny to think that there was a time when one of the limiting factors of computer science was the amount of paper you had, yes, and then in 1979, my father at the time was the director of computer science at a large high school in the suburbs of Toronto. in Scaro and uh Apple was coming out with its first personal computer that wasn't really the first undamaged one, the Apple 2 plus and uh, they were quite clever, they told the computer science heads in schools, take one home for the summer and decide if they want. to properly integrate it into the curriculum, so at the time my father's students were working with a large PDP, I think it was a PDP 11, probably off campus where they shared time and the computer science class involved punch cards and then run your program and then get your result and then the representative punch your cards so that the experience of and was the gap between those would be, you know, four or five days and, uh, the experience of having a basic interpreter interactive, uh and much less, you know. being able to program an assembler and everything else was so radically transformative in the way we understood computers let alone use them, that it was a no-brainer, so my dad bought one at the end of the summer and then I had a series of Apple computers for many years because now I remember reading about someone who said you have a tattoo, if you still have it.

Yes, I have to head over to show you, but yes, I have some. sad Mac on my bicep in 1988 89 I was 18 and had a Mac SE that I had hand overclocked to a se30 which was my first yes and was always very finicky and used to scuzzy which was the worst platform ever made for chain drives and it was particularly bad because if you had a loose connection or if you unplugged a drive unexpectedly or if one drive in the chain failed, you could corrupt the entire chain and you would just have a bunch of data on it and a bunch of old disks that I I got stuck and something went wrong and I lost everything and spent about 10 days locked in my room on a flat chair, just ordering pizzas and steaming cartons. of cigarettes and get my data back, you know, literally, little by little with a um with a uh um with you know, the hex editor, and when everything was back I decided to commemorate it with the little vamori and I went to a tattoo shop and I made myself a sad M, which is what happens when your M starts badly, but now you're going to do it, where are you?

I'm not going to the Reno World Sci-Fi Convention in Reno, Nevada, yeah, wow, I've never been there, right? I've been to Las Vegas but I've never been to Reno Reno's Reno is no longer a city that many people have called to go to, which is why it's cheap enough to hold a world convention in Reno's, you know, of course. Fame. for the Quicky divorce you get divorced there, yeah, yeah, uh Vegas for the quickie marriage Reno for the Quicky divorce, so, yeah, I'm going to Reno because that's what I'm so envious of you in so many ways, basically I'm just a great envy because you know which one it is and it is generational.

I can't even blame myself for that, it's not my fault that I was born in 1956, so I came a little early so that you already know everything. What you have done is what I wanted to do. I mean, I've published a lot of books through publishers, you know, and all that stuff, but then I kept hearing about you in that world of breaking the mold and challenging what you perceive. I know that's how you do it and you know it and obviously with success you know it. I think it's amazing how you've done it. I don't really know what you've done.

I want to know what I want you to tell me. because well, okay, I mean, I started submitting stories to magazines when I was 16 and I started selling to semi-pros when I was 17 and I really broke through with a sale to a professional market when I was 26, so 10 years. later, yeah, a few years later, I sold enough stories that were so well received that I won the Campbell Award for best new writer in the field, which was quite an honor and that was in 200000, and um, uh, later that year I sold my first novel to Tour Books, but it didn't come out until 2003, at which point a lot of things happened with e-books and, for the most part, at that time, e-books, my editor, said that e-books they have the worst ratio of hours in meetings to dollars in revenue of any publication I've made these days Google has released beautiful optical character recognition libraries and we have great image processing to let you scan books that aren't designed for you to scan a book that trapezoidal and then you can correct the image and then do the OCR so it becomes much faster, but in those days I tried it to see what it was about.

I said, you know, what really happens when a member of my audience decides they love my book enough to want to have a copy available on the Internet, yeah, it took me 80 hours and you know I could probably reduce that with practice to 40, but It still caught my attention, especially since I had done a non-fiction book before that and I realized that 40 hours or 80 hours was probably 40 or 80 times the amount of actual individual advertising for my book God for God. part of anyone from the editor, yeah, yeah, so you know, I started thinking about this and I realized that I know facing the situation wasn't going to be any harder.

My audience only copied works because they loved them. No one, no one was putting in 40 hours because they hated it. I can't stand this book. I'm going to scan it. I'm going. buy another copy, cut the spine and scan it, you know, we're, we're, we don't know what to do about it, uh, to stop it, so I thought okay, so I can do three things, I can ignore it, I can accept it. or I can rage against it and, uh, three wasn't a start at least. I figured some of the people who are involved in this production aren't doing it because it's the big internet game, but because like I say because they love the book and, calling those people thieves, there's just no percentage in it. , so you know, because they want to buy my books, so at least let's not alienate those people, so what am I going to do right?

I thought, um. You know, there's a new Creative Commons thing. At the time I was dating a woman who is the CTO of Creative Commons at the time and the licenses hadn't been released yet. She was looking at her work through the license generator and I went back to my editor and she said, "There's some CC on the way." I had seen some of Larry Le's talks and told him that sounds good to me. I guess it can't hurt. It seems like a good experiment. editor Patrick Neelon Hayden I met him when I was 17 at a BBS and he ran his own Linux systems and wrote his own movable type plugins and was the most senior editor at the biggest science fiction W oral, so it was like, well, Well.

There's one guy who can only talk to one person, editor Tom Dhy, and convince him. a first novel, uh, it was, you know, it was a first novel with a $6,800 advance, right? I mean, we're not talking about a giant novel, you know, Hot Leg, expected, was just your basic, modest first novel, Venture, and your only one. What we really did differently was try this and we tried it partly because I was doing boing boing and boing boing at the time I had about 10,000 readers a day and that's kind of like if all my readers bought a book, it could be done, but uh, but I often at that time people would say, "Oh, this Dr., the guy who has, he has this blog with 10,000 readers, that's nothing, the mass market traditionally has 50 to 60,000 paperbacks." , uh, it's published in paperback, you've got nothing to lose, of course they're doing it." This thing with him has no followers and then 15 years later every time I publish an ebook they say that the doctor has so many followers that he can afford to do this, no one else can do it, yes it's true so I want say, yeah, uh. we tried it 30,000 downloads in the first 24 hours uh 60,000 in the next 24 hours it's done I stopped counting but millions of downloads it's in five or six impressions it's been published in about 10 or 15 languages ​​like it's very good, people always He told me, What will you do when e-books replace printed books and giving away e-books is no longer viable?

And I said, well, not giving away e-books will never be possible, so again, I imagine that whatever happens, it won't involve forcing people to pay for your books. Since there is no other way to get them than to pay for them, it will involve convincing people to pay for your books and I think one of the ways to convince people to do things is to not look like an idiot, so I put my books available and So this year I decided to try a print experiment. Do I really need to make a short story collection through a publisher?

They are not collections of stories, they are not great sources of income. You know, they're essentially vanity projects for writers. those who don't want to see their short fiction disappear, let's try it, let's try it as a real vanity project, so I made an ebook with many different formats. I started by calling Donation Wear and that generated very few donations and then I changed it. pay what you want and that generated a lot of donations uh and I also put the payment box on the page where you downloaded it from and I can't believe I was stupid enough to not have a little PayPal box on that page that had a download page and a donation page and again a big difference, lesson learned, which is good.

I did a print edition through Lulu and then expanded it through many other print-on-demand services, uh, my friend Barry, who designed one of my essay collections. and he's kind of the head of typography at Microsoft and he's a well-liked typographer. He is married to a great science fiction writer named e gun and when we were all in Japan for the world science fiction convention in Yokohama. Eileen was woefully neglected while John was harassed by typographers who simply adored his work, so Johnk, you know, very kindly agreed to write that, uh and um, I called him up with a little help because I thought you know he could only do this .

With the help of other people, I tapped four cover artists I knew and paid them whatever they wanted. In one case it was zero and in some cases it was royalties and in other cases cash and royalties, whatever they wanted for the covers if the covers had been made. I love your covers. Also yes, they are pretty good, it's funny because the one who wasn't collecting money is the only one selling the value of the prey. Wow, it's the one that's mostly tip, um and then I made a hardcover tomeasure, hardcover, uh. I went into an old Acres printer, you know, a centuries-old printer in Hatton Garden and asked them to make some beautiful prints, and then I took the signatures to Clarenell Street, to a Wyn binder, which is another family property. uh business at, you know, Clarenell BeatingHeart of the indust Revolution there and uh they made a beautiful binding and we stamped the number on the spine uh we're doing a print run of 275.

Now I have about 100 copies and I sold them for $275 each. Sorry, 250 units were sold for $275 each. Each one comes with an SD card placed in the cover with a BL, a blue thumbtack that has all the audio on it, so I asked all my voice actor friends to record the audio and then I also made the audio available as a download paying what you want and as a CD through Lulu. And I, um, wrote to all my writer friends and told them that I had just gone through my filing cabinet to clean up some things that were in there. all these things that, for lack of a better word, were like sentimental paper, just things that seemed somehow collectible, but I had no real reason to own them.

I just didn't want to throw them away, so I wrote to them and said, do you have anything like this? Because I'm going to use them for the final documents, so I'm just going to give you 70 80 100 writers, random things, shopping lists and editorial notes, and what do you have, um, and I'm I'm going to want you to sign them write what you es and I'm going to bind them as the correct final paper and they did and I got G. I got rejection letters. I received Jay's cancer diagnosis. I got um nello Hopkinson um uh uh. formal, uh, filing for bankruptcy, uh, so each book is totally, only one of them will have one of those things, yeah, and each of them pays me about 150 net not counting my work, so they're good. salaried, yeah, um, and then what I did was because it's print on demand.

I said okay, well it's going to have typos and I asked my mom to check it, she checked all my books, she always caught things that the subscribers didn't catch and I didn't. I didn't understand it so I asked him to check it, he found a bunch of typos which I fixed and then I said there will still be typos in this because there are always typos, it's printed on demand. I can change the book. between printings between copies, so if you find a typo send it to me, I will change it the day you send it to me and give you a footnote on the page and you can buy a copy of the book with your name on it.

I guess eh, and I patched about 150 bugs and they came down to almost nothing, it's so funny because every time you know, 3 weeks go by, four weeks go by without a typo, I think that's it, we're done and then someone finds no just a typo, but generally a very obvious typo, isn't it extraordinary? It's really amazing how someone will notice you. Yes, that may be so. I'm prepared to say that at some point I could have published the world's typo-free book, but I'm not sure because that should scare off a lot of publishers. I mean, I think there are people I'm involved with in that world who will see this.

Yes, they will. I mean, it's something. sometimes it confirms your prejudices and sometimes challenges your way of thinking. I think publishers, if they are honest with themselves and I know many of them are, will say that the most disruptive impact of the Internet has not been pirated books. It's been Amazon and it's been Walmart because Walmart is a creature of the Internet, the reason you can manage a supply chain that starts in guano and ends with a nationwide change, change that chain that spins, you know, like a ballerina. ballet every time the wind changes, it's because of the Internet because of that, so those are the two most disruptive forces in publishing, and in publishing, especially, the mass market has been destroyed by Walmart, not because of Walmart's price reduction, which is another problem and, of course, here we have got three for two offers and so on, but since the United States used to have 400 Regional Distributors and they made mass market sales to pharmacies and groceries and those Teamsters because they had job security and because they were there for long periods and Because they had to go down the aisle, books that weren't selling became very good at deciding what to put where, so my editor bought their first science novel fiction, a copy of Samuel Delaney's doin, which is this, you know, high literary New Wave science fiction.

No, that features dolphin sex from when I was a teenager in a drugstore in Suburban Phoenix. You know, that's how diverse the titles were outside of bookstores, and of course the way you learn that you're a book lover is not by reading a book. When you go to a bookstore once you are a book lover, the way you learn that you are a book lover is by buying a book somewhere else and when the Nationwide chains became more and more powerful, they required that Distributors single nationals that they worked with had 400. suppliers, yes, and uh, within the SP of a few years, the United States had been reduced to four or five suppliers and the medium-sized one had completely collapsed and then 10 or 15 years later , the new readers who would be expected to come after the current generation of readers simply were.

It's there because, while it was viable from Walmart's perspective to have only 100 titles in Nationwide presented outside of bookstores, it didn't capture that new cohort of hardcore daily book readers who were the bread and butter of bookstores and um, publishers. , and if it's us, they'll say: well, piracy is a distraction. You know, the real things we have to deal with, for example, in e-books, is the fact that many of the publishers now have e-book suppliers. We have non-negotiable DRM policies that lock our books in their formats and it is illegal for us to authorize our readers to break the DRM and go to a better supplier if we change suppliers at any time in the future and whenever we sell a book that has DRM. in it from Amazon or Apple or Sony um, it makes it more difficult for us to change the agreement with Amazon Apple or Sony and easier for them to change the easier for them to come back and demand a higher margin because if Amazon comes back and says true, no , we don't want 30%, we want 40%, we can't say okay, we're leaving Amazon because the moment you do, the total tens of millions of dollars spent on your books by millions of readers suddenly goes away.

They become a uh, a responsibility because they can't, they have to AB them to go to the next platform, yeah, I'm overwhelmed and then I realize there's a mess that I'm leaving behind, there's some kind of wake, a digital wake behind from me, there are simply many. of things that I really want to know I really want to see I really want to understand and it's just it's just too much. I'm just wondering if that's a generational thing I'm going for that I've now started doing. I can't see any. I just can't wrap my head around it, so I think there was a time when we relied on knowledge of specifics to navigate the world.

You had to know the route from A to B. Yes, you needed to know everything. every step of the process of making a car or, you know, hitting a sword on your Anvil. You needed to know all this or you needed to have the basic knowledge to more or less figure out solutions on your own and I didn't. I no longer believe that is the case. I think we live in a world now where what you need to know is the narrative of how something works that you can generate. Search terms you can connect to Google to find out how to do it when you get there. there yes and I remember this great poem The old crow knows where to go the young crow no uh no the old crow is getting slow the young crow is not uh the only thing the old crow knows is where to go well and uh we have a kind of reversal now almost or not necessarily, but we have this thing now among young people that you can figure out where to go by turning a page and then you know, I wrote this novel little brother which is a kind of radical young adult novel about children who take charge of the government in the United States to restore the Bill of Rights after the anti-terrorism department of women and values ​​gets too intimidated, they wage a gorilla war against the United States and have some things that seem like recipes for building revolutionary technology, but they are not all what you need to know, are all you need to know to find out everything you need to know, just the search term and one of the things that worries me. about when we see platforms being blocked is, um, if there's no exposed rough edge, if there's nothing that means you can go to Google and figure out how to do more, then that part of the experience falls off the device, so I think. that the successful navigation technique in the 21st century is to stop trying to read everything, yes, stop trying to understand everything, but understand enough of the essence that when the time comes that you need to synthesize more things into one piece and sit back and do a deep investigation.

Dive into it, you know what the search terms are and that's what blogging does for me. Blogging by writing short blurbs about articles I've read briefly, yes, expressing what has caught your interest to a third party requires you to fine-tune it. in your own mind makes it demonic, you know and that's what I do with boing boing and that's what you know, one of the ways I write is that every once in a while a bunch of scattered things seem to cohere, yeah. and I you know and then I have notes on them in boing boing and I go and reread my notes and then I sit down to compose yes yes I'm not going to do that I that's absolutely because one of the things that I've realized recently again with my wife was searching for something on Google and since I had done it so much, almost obsessively, then I realized, since I only realized while I was doing it with her, the speed and the way. that my brain now finds a way because we're not that's not that that's not what we're looking for is this is this they go that way and I don't even know because she was looking at her what are you doing? yes, yes, absolutely, say: look, you're not going to find it if, how do you know?

Let's go down this path and I'll find it and then you find a link and you follow that link and stuff and then you realize it's actually, it's an intellectual skill that there's no way my teachers or college professors or anyone when I I was 15 and knew it, which is why it's funny when we say we can close libraries now because librarians have always focused on navigating authority and queries, not shelving books. you know, actually, that would have been the only group of people when I was 15 that would have understood what I was doing, would be Li good and talk about how to navigate the Authority properly, so librarians have always been in the face of coal from the fire hose, depending on their in your narrative and they've sat there, you know, with all the books in the world clamoring for their attention, they've chosen the ones that they thought were authoritative and that's what you do when you Sit down and ask a question.

I got all these search results and you have to figure out what's authoritative and you know the feature that we used to be able to use was that between covers someone took the time to invest in the publication, it's probably authoritative, of course that was never the case. True, I'm referring to the conference between the covers, but it was quite true that we got away with it for a long time and I celebrate the fact that we have finally recognized that not everything that is true is between the covers and not. everything between the covers is true yes, yes, sorry, that's right and well well done, it was fantastic, very good and now you're really good, you're not late, because I was a little anxious that we would get caught up in something really bad.

It'll be an hour by now I'm a bit of a veteran at this, you know, this is brilliant, okay, thank you very much, thank you very much.