This is my third novel, and as with my first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and my second, Eastern Standard Tribe, I am releasing it for free on the Internet the very same day that it ships to the stores. The books are governed by Creative Commons licenses that permit their unlimited noncommercial redistribution, which means that you’re welcome to share them with anyone you think will want to see them. In the words of Woody Guthrie:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Why do I do this? There are three reasons:

Short Term

In the short term, I’m generating more sales of my printed books. Sure, giving away ebooks displaces the occasional sale, when a downloader reads the book and decides not to buy it. But it’s far more common for a reader to download the book, read some or all of it, and decide to buy the print edition. Like I said in my essay, Ebooks Neither E Nor Books, digital and print editions are intensely complimentary, so acquiring one increases your need for the other. I’ve given away more than half a million digital copies of my award-winning first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and that sucker has blown through five print editions (yee-HAW!), so I’m not worried that giving away books is hurting my sales.

Long Term

Some day, though, paper books will all but go away. We’re already reading more words off of more screens every day and fewer words off of fewer pages every day. You don’t need to be a science fiction writer to see the writing on the wall (or screen, as the case may be).

Now, if you’ve got a poor imagination, you might think that we’ll enter that era with special purpose “ebook readers” that simulate the experience of carrying around “real” books, only digital. That’s like believing that your mobile phone will be the same thing as the phone attached to your wall, except in your pocket. If you believe this sort of thing, you have no business writing sf, and you probably shouldn’t be reading it either.

No, the business and social practice of ebooks will be way, way weirder than that. In fact, I believe that it’s probably too weird for us to even imagine today, as the idea of today’s radio marketplace was incomprehensible to the Vaudeville artists who accused the radio station owners of mass piracy for playing music on the air. Those people just could not imagine a future in which audiences and playlists were statistically sampled by a special “collection society” created by a Congressional anti-trust “consent decree,” said society to hand out money collected from radio stations (who collected from soap manufacturers and other advertisers), to compensate artist

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