 I'm on the mailing list of the Union for the Public Domain. I got the following forwarded email, sent originally to Cory Doctorow himself, regarding his books,
which are distributed under a free Creative-Commons license. Just
to let everyone know that we open-content hippies are doing our part
for the men and women overseas.
Just like to thank you, from some undisclosed (for operational
security reasons, doncha know) location in the middle of the
Mediterranean Sea, for keeping my sanity. I'm in the US Navy, and
my ship got surge-deployed without warning a couple weeks ago to
"help" with the situation in Lebanon. On a ship underway, there's
no room to keep books -- unless they're the ancient, creaking John
Grisham paperbacks in the ship's library - and no time to get some
anyway if you're scrambling around for the couple days of warning
you have trying to get your bills set up to pay themselves and
telling your landlord you're vanishing for an "open-ended" period
of time. So, the ability to download your stuff from craphound has
permitted me to feed my addiction to the printed word without
having to have someplace to store the physical artifact of the
books. Of course, I actually printed out Someone Comes and Down
and Out, the two I don't own dead-tree copies of yet, and stuck 'em
in a binder, where they've been passed from person to person in my
department, helping keep the other sci-fi junkies similarly sane.
[three days later]
Thought you might like to know that what started as "Jamie feeds
his print addiction" has turned into something else entirely. The
sci-fi addicts rapidly finished off the two novels I'd printed out
and bindered, and I had the binder with me in the engine room,
reading to pass the time, when one of the other guys asked what I
was reading.
A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of
the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, "Hey,
who's got page 41 of Down and Out?" It was... well, I'm not sure I
can express how weird it was. These are men who aren't normally
readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and
they're now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so
they can find out what happens next.
It's starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the
ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present
three B's of talk to pass in the time in the plant -- beer, babes,
and bodily functions -- it's discussions of which novel (or short,
since we've now got printouts of every piece of fiction on
craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why,
and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it,
and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that's
important.
I spent about two hours last night as I was reading glancing up
every so often, and grinning like an idiot every time 'cause there
were five guys whose talk usually revolves around how drunk they
were this one time head-down in some pretty intense reading.
Thank you. This is really something else.
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