You make much of your work available free online as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. What prompted you to give your work away for free, and how difficult was it to convince your publishers to go along with the idea?
It's just good business. As publisher Tim O'Reilly says, an author's worst problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Of all the people who failed to buy one of my books today, the vast majority did so because they never heard of them, not because they got a free digital copy from the Internet. Indeed, a digital copy makes the print copy more valuable, since it adds utility in the form of portability, ease of reproduction, searching and archiving, and so on. In short, giving away ebooks sells print books.
It's a great moment to be an SF writer. SF appears to be the only fiction that anyone cares about enough to really aggressively steal over the Internet. I'd rather be in the "worth stealing" camp than the "beneath notice" camp. As with every revolution in information production and dissemination, Internet-based copying will create lots of opportunities for attentive, entrepreneurial artists who don't turn crybaby the minute last year's business model is threatened by next year's. I'm going to be one of the entrepreneurs.
My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was behind me all the way on this. It was a no-brainer for him and Tor, and the books have sold well enough that there's never been any question as to whether I'll continue the experiment.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2006 09:41:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
