Cory Doctorow - Homeland

A commercial interlude

As you read through this free ebook, you'll notice that it is dotted, here and there, with appreciations of great bookstores -- stores that I love, stores that have shown me love. As a former bookseller and a book hoarder for life, bookstores are my natural habitat. It's my hope that as you read this, you'll (ahem) bookmark these stores for regular visits and show them the love they deserve.

I've also dotted this ebook with "commercial interludes," in which I shamelessly pitch the commercial editions of this book. This, after all, is my living. It's how I feed my family. It's how I come to have the extraordinary privilege of sitting in an office all day, making up stories and putting them down in words, which is all I ever wanted to do, since I was six years old. This being the 21st century, there is no way I can force you to pay for this book before reading it -- you can get pretty much any ebook on the Internet for free with no more difficulty than you'd undergo if you were to buy it through legit channels -- so I hope that by giving you this, and trusting you, that you will reward me by helping to support me and my publisher (whose contribution to this book can't be overstated).

Now, perhaps you're thinking, "Hey, I don't really need a commercial ebook, and I don't want the print book -- can't I just say thank you some other way?" The answer to that is a resounding yes. As with my other recent books, I have assembled a list of librarians, teachers, and people from other public institutions who would like to get a free copy of Homeland for their kids and patrons. I pay an assistant, the wonderful Olga Nunes, to check out each of these people and ensure that they are who they say they are, and then we list them here:

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If you want to tip me for this book, don't send me cash. Instead, send one of those institutions a copy of this book -- buy it from your local store and have it shipped, or buy it online -- and that way a bunch of kids will get access to it, and I'll get the sale credited to my name, which means bigger advances, bigger publicity budgets, and more foreign sales for me. It's a way to pay your debts forward in realtime, and it's pretty nifty (if I do say so myself).

(And I do)

Back to buying the book. This book is published by Tor Teen, and like all Tor books, all of its ebook editions are DRM-free. The hardcovers (and the paperbacks, when they ship) pay me a healthy royalty, and go to support a publisher that has poured huge amounts of money and time into making my books better and bringing them to the world. In other words, they're not just good books -- they're books that do good. Here's how you get yours:

USA:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)
Google Books (DRM-free)
Kobo
Apple iBooks (DRM-free)
Amazon
Indiebound (will locate an independent store near you!)
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)
Kobo
Chapters/Indigo
Amazon.ca

You don't have to buy the book from an online seller, either. Here's a tool that will find you independent stores in your area that have copies on their shelves.

This section is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.

Chapters/Indigo

This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. That means:

You are free:

Under the following conditions:

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link <

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get our permission

More info here: <

See the end of this file for the complete legalese.

GOSH: London, England

London's GOSH doesn't even stock my books. They're strictly graphic novels. But what a store! They've got this absolutely choice corner store on Berwick Street, right in the middle of Soho, amidst the dirty bookstores, brothels, vintage vinyl stores, upscale dim sum places, and rad Australian coffee-houses. The store is spacious, having successfully resisted the comic-store-manager's traditional vice of piling stuff up and stacking it close to maximize the funnybooks and tchotchkes. Instead, it has this brilliantly curated look-and-feel, dominated by huge tables full of brilliantly hand-picked choices, and a basement full of oversized hardcovers and long-boxes full of old singles. You really couldn't ask for a better comic store in a better location.

GOSH: 1 Berwick St, London, W1F 0DR +44 20 7636 1011

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 this book (which would put it in the top millionth of a percentile for novels), that's still only fifty or 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.

Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament recently passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed in 2010 without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.