During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

August 17, 2006

Cory Doctorow on Win-Win Publishing
Creative behind a keyboard

Cory Doctorow speaking at a conference
Alvy's Photos

For creative folks who might be thinking of sticking a toe into the open content online swamp, Cory Doctorow’s advice is to dive right in at the deep end, as he has. A man of many accomplishments, he is a leader of the new publishing era where open digital, Internet distribution is the formula for both fame and fortune. 

On the website for his recent science fiction novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Doctorow provides this download invitation for the full text of the book:

On this page, you will find downloadable full-text versions of my book in open formats that contain no DRM (a stupid, scientifically bankrupt technology that seeks to restrict how you use and copy digital files after acquiring them). They are licensed under terms set out by Creative Commons, terms that allow you to undertake unlimited noncommercial distribution of the book. Share this book! That’s what it’s for. In the words of Woody Guthrie, “Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

What’s more, if you live in the developing world — a country not on the World Bank’s list of high-income countries — you can do much more. You can make your own editions, charge money for them, make movies, translations, plays and anything else you care to, and charge whatever you want, without sending me one cent — you don’t even need my permission. See the FAQ for more. The only restriction is that you can’t export your versions to the world’s high-income countries where all my paying customers are. Deal? Deal.

There are a few restrictions for redistribution of the book, such as not allowing anyone to copy its cover artwork by Dean McKean, because it does not belong to Doctorow. As he has for almost everything he has written, this top science fiction writer both sells and gives away his writing.  He tells us in his online biography that by this process he makes money.

I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. Me, I’m looking to find ways to use copying to make more money and it’s working: enlisting my readers as evangelists for my work and giving them free ebooks to distribute sells more books. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Best of all, giving away ebooks gives me lots of key insights into how to make money without restricting the copying of bits. It’s a win-win situation.

Cory Doctorow was born in 1971. He relates in his biography that he learned to type before he learned to write cursively, and that he has “spent most of my life behind a keyboard.” As the Internet took off, he entered his twenties and became an interpreter of the digital future and an activist for “uploading liberty in technology law, policy and standards.” He has also become well known as the co-editor of Boing-Boing the most visited blog online (according to Technorati), and for his science fiction novels.

Cory Doctorow’s win-win situation is a model that education can follow to the enormous benefit of the new global generation that is typing with it thumbs before it talks. Open education resources that can freely flow into the developing world would be a wonderful win for millions of children who now have few or no hardcopy learning materials. There is no reason to expect that—rescued from obscurity by being given away online—open education resources would not make money for their authors and publishers.