Cory Doctorow has released his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, online, same as he did with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Both books are available both as freely downloadable bits (complete w/Creative Commons license) or as less freely purchasable atoms.
I'll be reading EST over the next couple of weeks, time permitting, if for no other reason than Doctorow is doing (and succeeding at) exactly what the mainstream media monopols are claiming can't be done. He's trusting in the value of his work to make him money, rather than the restrictions of the economy.
The alternatives -- sitting pat, or worse, getting into a moral panic about "piracy" and accusing the readers who are blazing new trail of "the moral equivalent of shoplifting" -- have a zero percent chance of success.
Will the 2nd, 3rd, and 897th writers who follow suit will enjoy the same notoriety or success? Maybe not. But I was browsing through Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics yesterday, and this recalls to me what he has to say about the way that the contact between author and reader gets deferred, mediated, and obstacled, and the ways that the net might cause us to rethink all the constraints we place on such contact. And it's cool to see Doctorow doing something about it. And a helluva lot more interesting to me than that theater commercial with the stunt man telling me how wrong it is to download movies. Or the bands who have survived the colossal hazing known as the music industry fight with both hands to force everyone else to submit to similar abuse.
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