What’s the point of a houseful of books you’ve already read?

DRM is already widely deployed without a hint of success and the NAVSHP group has the opportunity to learn from its well-known failures, … NAVSHP should take a new look into how DRM affects the...

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

It’s hard not to like Asimov; he’s a really likable guy.

What petulant jerks. Look, Sony, you got caught sleazing your customers’ computers. Telling us that it wasn’t so bad is just infuriating and insulting. An apology would have been better received.

The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.

if I want to enable my readers push copies to their friends, and they’re in circles like Slashdot, Wired, Boing Boing, who never meet face to face, just online, well i need to give it...

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

It’s part of a cycle of stories I’m writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

The EU and the world are experiencing a revolution in creativity thanks to the Internet, … An entire generation of remixers, talented amateurs, and Creative Commons enthusiasts have created works that do not require DRM...

It’s our goddamed city! It’s our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we’re free. Once we’re not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You’re young enough and...

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, … and they do it simply because they love books. You don’t buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on...

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you’re really having a deep relationship with it.

It’s weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it’s just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it’s a lot more emotionally raw.

is it any different to loaning a book to someone? There was a book in the US ( Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood ) that had almost zero promotion and no marketing from the...

Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it....

It does the thing that all great non-fiction needs to do makes a subject interesting because of how it’s covered, not because of the subject itself. I don’t care about French food but I loved...

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

There are answers that cover the short, medium and long term. Everyone needs to realise that the thing the internet is good at is copying files, especially text files, between different locations. It is not...

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by...

Blooks differ from books in several ways

the problem with reading off a screen isn’t resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it’s that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work...

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There’s lots of good stuff on the ballot.

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

If you stare at someone long enough, they’ll eventually look back at you.

Blogs encourage their authors to publish in small, partially formed chunks,

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free and we’re not. Guess who’s winning the “war on terror?

The other one I did was “I, Robot.” I take apart Isaac Asimov’s Robots world.

[What is the new is the creative process involved in producing a blook.] Blogs encourage their authors to publish in small, partially formed chunks, … Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the author’s...

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we’re all creative. We come up with weird and...

But this is just the start of something much bigger.

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!

Well, I don’t know. It’s long, it’s longer than both of the other books put together, so it’s more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in...

And it is promotion. My publisher, Tor Books, have some modern methods that allow them to make a profit on as little as 3,000 copies of a hardcover novel. The traditional methods would need a...

free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s...

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and...

What little empirical evidence is out there points to eBooks and free downloading increases sales on a net basis.

I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to...

Previously, such jottings might have been kept in the author’s notebook but something amazing happens when you post them online. Readers help you connect them, flesh them out and grow them into fully-fledged books or...

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part,...

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what’s going on in my life.

[Has it been a success though, I ask.] I don’t know, … I don’t have another first novel that wasn’t pushed electronically to compare it to. But the book itself is doing very well. Looking...

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:a certain amount of difficultyplusa certain amount of your friendsplusa certain amount of interesting strangersplusa certain amount...

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

If I am going to be a writer, earning a living in the era of digital text, I need to understand where the opportunities are. They won’t disappear, they’ll just be different, and need to...

I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for...

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn’t work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species...

Finally, in the short term it’s really obvious. People need to hear about my book, and if they’ve found out about it and buy it, I make money. The net cost of eBook distribution from...

Novels for me are how I find out what’s going on in my own head. And so that’s a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other...