Eastern Standard Tribe | Page 2

can to sweeten my odds.
So here we are, and here is novel number two, a book called Eastern Standard Tribe,
which you can walk into shops all over the world and buy
[ http://craphound.com/est/buy.php ] as a physical artifact -- a very nice physical artifact,
designed by Chesley-award-winning art director Irene Gallo and her designer Shelley
Eshkar, published by Tor Books, a huge, profit-making arm of an enormous,
multinational publishing concern. Tor is watching what happens to this book nearly as
keenly as I am, because we're all very interested in what the book is turning into.
To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery
bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy
things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools
designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their
users copy and slice and dice -- rip, mix and burn! -- and that's what I'm hoping you will
do with this.
Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is run by
addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book
revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your
collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen.
Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all
the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the
difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece
of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.
I'm unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a new practice of book,
readers. Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over
P2P networks. Put it on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook formats. Show
me -- and my colleagues, and my publisher -- what the future of book looks like.
I'll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But as cool and wonderful as
writing is, it's not half so cool as inventing the future. Thanks for helping me do it.
Here's a summary of the license:
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original author credit. No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy,
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based on it. Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and
perform the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for commercial purposes --
unless they get the licensor's permission.
And here's the license itself: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode
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