.© Paula Mariel Salischiker, pausal.co.uk
I caught up with Cory Doctorow at a conference in London last week and chatted to him about blooks and the Blooker Prize.
Among his several claims to fame – best-selling sci-fi author, blogger, co-editor of boingboing, journalist, technology activist – Cory was, of course, also chair of the judging panel for the inaugural Blooker Prize in 2006 (won by Julie Powell’s blook, Julie and Julia).
Cory therefore was a pioneer in the world of blooks and bliterature. He remains a big fan. What attracts him to blooks, he said, is the same thing that attracts him to blogs. Blogging, blooks and self-publishing all turn the old publishing rules on their head.
“It’s the artistic satisfaction of writing what you are interested in – then attracting an audience for it, rather than finding an audience first and then having to then write for that audience.”
“What surprised me as a judge of the Blooker, was the sheer diversity of material submitted for the prize – plus the fact that blooks do a good job of showing how a small fragmented audience can be serviced online.”
Sure, he said, for a small print-run, a traditional publisher could put 2,000 printed copies of a book on the shelves – but online, those same 2,000 copies can reach a much wider audience across the world.
Cory’s own novels are published in print form by Tor Books and HarperCollins UK and simultaneously released on the Web under Creative Commons licences.
So what drives him currently? Well he’s is passionately against what he sees as the use of copyright laws as an instrument of control.
In a keynote he delivered last week to the Internet Librarian International conference entitled Copyright, Copyleft, Privacy, Librarians and Freedom,
ustream.tv/recorded/2356216, Cory gave a rallying call to librarians from 33 countries. He urged them to join him in becoming activists against anachronistic copyright laws designed for a pre-Internet age.
Meanwhile, at a time when it seems like new e-reader devices are coming onto the market almost every week, I asked Cory for his vision of the future of the e-book.
He sees them as a sales tool: an enticement, not a replacement for the printed book.
“Right now, there is a tremendous business to be made in giving away e-books. But that may change. If it does, we will re-invent things. The way we will re-invent things is to be at the coal-face … by seeing how people use e-books”.
Since we launched the Blooker Prize, e-books have grown vastly in importance. It seems likely that any future Blooker Prize should be open to e-books as well as print.
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