Late to the party

I like to show up late. I dread the first hour of any party (especially if I am the host) —all that nervous energy, all the blank air and grinding conversational gears as things get into full swing. I’d much rather arrive just after things have gotten a little noisy and crowded, and that applies, I’m afraid,  to many other aspects of my life. No one will ever refer to me as a member of any vanguard.

Which is why I can now insist, unembarrassed by the late hour, that everybody who creates content needs to read Content, Cory Doctorow’s collection of essays on the subject. There is much to consider, much to argue with, and a fair portion of joy in the excitement Mr. Doctorow —President of the Internet, Captain of the Future— feels about the very changes I hope to investigate on this blog. If you’ve already read it, I look forward to your comments!

Some of the tech geek stuff was a little inscrutable to me (see “Microsoft Research DRM Talk”) — perhaps because I missed the discussion that led up to everybody doing shots of tequila by the kitchen sink. But when he is talking about writing, about copyright, about Ebooks, he is talking to all of us who use words to create our art.

And the book is available as a free download. Go ahead —he wants you to download it, share it, hell, even print it off on your home printer if you are a total nerdball. (Yes, I did.)

I particularly recommend the following essays:

• You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen
• How Do You Protect Artists?
• What’s the Most Important Right Creators Have?
• Giving It Away
• How Copyright Broke
• Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
• Free(konomic) Ebooks

You’ll find the book here, in almost any format you can think of: http://craphound.com/content/download/