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Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Cory Doctorow
doctorow@craphound.com
Published by Tor Books
July 2005
ISBN: 0765312786
http://craphound.com/someone
Some Rights Reserved
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=============== About this book ===============
This is my third novel, and as with my first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (http://craphound.com/down) and my second, Eastern Standard Tribe (http://craphound.com/est), I am releasing it for free on the Internet the very same day that it ships to the stores. The books are governed by Creative Commons licenses that permit their unlimited noncommercial redistribution, which means that you're welcome to share them with anyone you think will want to see them. In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Why do I do this? There are three reasons:
* Short Term
In the short term, I'm generating more sales of my printed books. Sure, giving away ebooks displaces the occasional sale, when a downloader reads the book and decides not to buy it. But it's far more common for a reader to download the book, read some or all of it, and decide to buy the print edition. Like I said in my essay, Ebooks Neither E Nor Books, (http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt), digital and print editions are intensely complimentary, so acquiring one increases your need for the other. I've given away more than half a million digital copies of my award-winning first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and that sucker has