Doctory, Cory. Content. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2008.

Cory Doctorow is a geek. He’s proud of it and others are proud of him for it. He’s a SF writer and blogger at Boing Boing. He has very strong feelings about copyright and how wrong it currently is. The essays in Content are mostly about copyright and how big business is not only doing things wrong but stifling creativity and screwing their public.

Many of the essays are about copyright and legally imposed limitations on goods and services. Basically, our electronics are capable of doing so much more but they can’t because then we could use them more and someone very high up the chain thinks they wouldn’t be making as much money off the consumers. An early example Doctorow gives is a mother who’s just bought a Disney DVD for her kids. She knows DVDs and her kids. The format is sensitive and the kids are, well, kids. She figures she’ll make a VHS copy of the DVD and she can just replace it as it gets worn out. She’ll get more use out of the movie and won’t have to worry about the kids destroying it. But she can’t make a copy. She doesn’t know much about electronics but she figures out how to connect the players. What she didn’t know is that VCRs can’t properly copy from DVDs and that this is a feature purposely added to prevent exactly what she wants to do. Even though she was only going to use the copy at home the same way she would have used the DVD, the copying is illegal. That and many more examples of copyright law and industry dealings are presented in the book.

The book itself comes into question in the foreword by John Perry Barlow. He gets rather philosophical about what exactly the book is, what it contains, and what makes it up. These questions are explored more in other essays. Doctorow has released all his books simultaneously as ebooks along with the print edition. Content can be downloaded in many formats here and clicking around the site will bring you to the rest of his books. Doctorow does that to increase his audience. He’ll admit that he’s a midlist author. But his books have had multiple printings and he believes it’s at least partially due to the ebooks. They’re more readily available so they reach more people than print books. Some of those people then go buy his books. He looses no money. People started asking if they could give him money for the ebooks if they don’t want a hard copy. Instead of that, there’s a system in place where schools and libraries can request copies of his books and readers can buy a copy for them. It gets more books out and is no hassle for his taxes.

After the dirty, angering legal battles Doctorow talks about in the first essays the collection becomes more about ideas. Libraries are not the focus of any essay but he writes about things librarians need to know. Realizing that things change and the standards are not standards for long is key. Some of the things he mentions are already old and done but they’ve lead into what we have now and what will morph in the future. He talks about the future, as a SF writer would do, and his love of computers and technology shines through. Doctorow’s greatest strength is in his open-mindedness. He can imagine where we’ll be going and worlds we could have if we weren’t so restricted. He makes complex concepts easily understood so that just about anyone can start seeing connections or dreaming about possibilities in areas they never would have considered. His essay on metadata is shorter but more meaningful and helpful than anything I’ve read about it in school texts.

This is a great primer for someone who wonders what the big deal about copyright is, is curious about digital worlds, wonders what the future of the ebook is, or is a geek in need of some real life sf. It will get you thinking and introduce concepts that will come up in your work–and some that you may want to bring up.