Cory Doctorow
Last updated 18 April 2010
This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means:
You are free:
See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
For the Win
is my second young adult novel, and, like my 2008 book
Little Brother
, it is meant to do more than tell a story.
For the Win
is a book about economics (a subject that suddenly got a lot more relevant about halfway through the writing of this book, when the world's economy slid unceremoniously into the toilet and got stuck there), justice, politics, games and labor.
For the Win
connects the dots between the way we shop, the way we organize, and the way we play, and why some people are rich, some are poor, and how we seemed to get stuck there.
I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper into the subjects of "behavioral economics" (and related subjects like "neuroeconomics") and to start asking hard questions about how we end up with the stuff we own, and what it costs our human brothers and sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need them.
But it's a poor politics that can only express itself by choosing to buy or not buy something. Sometimes (often!), you need to organize to make a difference.
This is the golden age of organizing. If there's one thing the Internet's changed forever, it's the relative difficulty and cost of getting a bunch of people in the same place, working for the same goal. That's not always good (thugs, bullies, racists and loonies never had it so good), but it is fundamentally
game-changing
.
It's hard to remember just how difficult this organizing stuff used to be: how hard it was to do something as trivial as getting ten friends to agree on dinner and a movie, let alone getting millions of people together to raise money for a political candidate, get the vote out, protest corruption, or save an endangered and beloved institution.
The net doesn't solve the problem of injustice, but it solves the first hard problem of righting wrongs: getting everyone together and keeping them together. You still have to do the even
harder
work of risking life, limb, personal fortune, reputation,
Every wonderful thing in our world has fight in its history. Our rights, our good fortune, our happiness and all that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better. Those risks are not diminished one iota by the net. But the rewards are every bit as sweet.
The good folks at Random House Audio produced a
fantastic
audio edition of this book. You can buy it on CD, or you can buy the MP3 version from a variety of online booksellers.
I also sell it myself on my site
Unfortunately, you can't buy this book from the world's most popular audiobook vendors: Apple's iTunes and Amazon's Audible. That's because neither store would allow me to sell the audiobook on terms that I believe are fair and just.
Specifically, Apple refused to carry the book unless it had "digital rights management" on it. This is the technology that locks music to Apple's devices. It's illegal to move DRM-crippled files to devices that Apple hasn't blessed, which means that if I encourage you to buy my works through Apple, I lose the ability to choose to continue to sell to you from Apple's competition at some later date in the future. That seems like a bad deal for both of us.
To its credit, Audible (which supplies all of the audiobooks on iTunes)
was
willing to sell this book without DRM, but they insisted on including their extremely onerous "end user license agreement," which
also
prohibits moving my book to a device that Audible hasn't approved. To make it easy for them, I offered to simply record a little intro that said, "Cory Doctorow and Random House Audio grant you permission to use this book in any way that does not violate copyright law." That way, they wouldn't have to make
any
changes to their site or the agreements you have to click through to use it. But Audible refused.
I wouldn't sell this book through Wal-Mart if they insisted that you could only shelve it on a Wal-Mart bookcase and I won't sell it through any online retailer that imposes the same requirement on your virtual bookshelves. That's also why you won't find my books for sale for the Kindle or iPad stores -- both stores insist on the right to lock you into terms that I believe are unfair and bad for both of us.
I'm pretty bummed about this. For the record, I would gladly sell through both Apple and Audible if they'd let me sell it without DRM, and under the world's shortest EULA ("Don't violate copyright law.") In the meantime, I thank you in advance for patronizing online audiobook sellers who respect the rights of both authors and audiences. And I am especially grateful to Random House Audio for backing me in this fight to get a fair deal for all of us.
The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.
I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of
For the Win
(which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.
I
hate
the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just
stupid
to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a
license
to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.
Copyright laws are increasingly passed wihtout democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament has just passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.
It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada have been negotiating a secret copyright treaty called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) that has all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan is to agree to this in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless the do. In America, the plan is to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. Though this began under Bush, the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm.
So if you're not violating copyright la right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now.
So, basically,
screw that
. Or, as the singer, Wobbly and union organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:
"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."
Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it.
Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself
here
).
There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.
I'm proposing that we put them together.
If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of
For the Win
, email
[email protected]
with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to
http://craphound.com/ftw/donate/
by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of
For the Win
and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to
http://craphound.com/ftw/donate/
and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to
[email protected]
so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.
I've done this with three of my titles now, and gotten more than a thousand books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification." That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?
Many scenes in this file have been dedicated to bookstores: stores that I love, stores that have helped me discover books that opened my mind, stores that have helped my career
along. The stores didn't pay me anything for this -- I haven't even
told them about it -- but it seems like the right thing to do. After
all, I'm hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the
paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can
pick it up!
For Poesy: Live as though it were the early days of a better nation.
This scene is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. Bakka
is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me
the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the
age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes,
the
Tanya Huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back
into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper's "Little
Fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I
was 18, I was working at Bakka -- I took over from Tanya when she
retired to write full time -- and I learned life-long lessons about
how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a
bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years!
For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology
of stories by Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara
(AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and
me!)
BakkaPhoenix
Books
: 697 Queen Street West,
Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993
There were eight monitors on his desk, arranged in two ranks of four, the top row supported on a shelf he'd bought from an old lady scrap dealer in front of the Dongmen market. She'd also sold him the monitors, shaking her head at his idiocy: at a time when everyone wanted giant, 30" screens, why did he want this collection of dinky little 9" displays?