Cory Doctorow, For the Win!
There’s just not enough time or bandwidth for me to share everything I’m excited about, but I really do want to sound my excitable yawp about Cory Doctorow, who just launched his new YA novel For the Win. Doctorow releases free downloads of all of his books, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. He’s a great champion of re-thinking the ways that we use (and abuse) copyright, and for re-imagining the way that writers and creators can operate in an evolving media landscape. I’ve only had a few subway moments to spend with For the Win, but I’d recommend that anyone interested in how/why an author would give away his books for free on the internet should download the book and read Doctorow’s introduction.
Plagiarism, copyright, borrowing, and texts: these are all topics that have fascinated me since college. I was particularly moved by an essay Kathy Acker wrote for the MMLA about copyright nearly fifteen years ago, in which she reiterates the importance of friendship and community in the work of creation. Based in part on my work on Acker (and my appreciation for her methods) I planned to write my dissertation on plagiarism/borrowing across a broad and surprising swath of American authors. Instead, a decade after I left grad school, I find myself an author as well as a reader, grappling with these issues and their intersection with technology. Needless to say, I have taken a great interest in Doctorow’s creative and business models.
Of course, you can always purchase Doctorow’s books, and he hopes that you will! If you’re content with the electronic version, but would like to still generate a sale for him, you can put the book into the hands of teachers and librarians who would like to provide the book for their kids. Donate a copy of For the Win here.
Besides all this high falutin’ copyright talk, I’m excited for this book because I simply adore good YA sci-fi. I inhaled this stuff as a kid. It opened up my brain to all kinds of creative possibilities, and it opened up my heart to books. These books turned me into a reader. And while I’ve definitely read my share of Very Important Books in my life, and I’m glad to be part of challenging book clubs as an adult, nothing can replace the singular, joyful escape of curling up with an action-packed sci-fi story. (So, yes, I am counting the days until Mockingjay, the final book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series is released…)
I’m a Kindle owner. Most of the novels I read these days are in electronic format. My 
