Tachyon Books has just published Cory Doctorow‘s first collection of essays. Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future contains “28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects.” The book has an introduction by John Perry Barlow, which is available on this page.
As with his many of his books, Doctorow is “giving the whole electronic text away [from this page] in the hopes of selling more printed objects, and the fact that this is one of the best-looking books I’ve ever read really makes the case for owning the p-book as well as the e-book (there’s an essay on this subject in the book, too, natch).” He credits the look of the book to the efforts of designer John D. Berry.
And taking a page from the release of his novel Little Brother, he is “running a donations program for this book: if you love the book and want to donate something to me for it, you can do so by buying a copy for a librarian or teacher (teachers and librarians: you can request a copy for your institution). This worked incredibly well for Little Brother: we’ve gotten hundreds of copies of that hardcover into the hands of worthy, cash-strapped institutions thanks to the generosity of my readers.” To take part in the donation program, see this page.