Doctorow & Stross's "The Rapture of the Nerds" creative commons edition released | Hacker News Reader

Doctorow & Stross's "The Rapture of the Nerds" creative commons edition released

antipope.org

116 pointscstross25 comments

I haven't read the book yet, but I enjoyed reading all the front and back matter about the licensing etc.

    I am a copyright criminal, and so (in all probability) are you.
    No, I'm not exaggerating. I will confess to having cracked the
    DRM lock on novels that I wrote

-- Stross

    Dude. Did you seriously just read the entire legalese
    block? Or did your cat sit on the PgDn button? Either way,
    we stand in awe. You have attained the terminus of this    
    book and all its associated metadata, forematter, 
    afterwords, and other miscellanea. Achievement unlocked.

Nice old-school textfiles feel, I always enjoy that in Doctorow's free editions and it's nice to have Stoss in on it too.

There's a couple of commercial interludes scattered throughout the book that are similarly amusing. I came damn close to giving them money for the giggle-value of these things alone.

I know that the number of people buying this NOT from the US or Canada must be abysmally small, but I love both Stross ( stop whatever you're doing and go read Accelerando) and Doctorow (stop whatever you're doing and go read "for the win") and sadly, there is no practical way to get this in exchange of a decent number of my precious euros. That's too bad, really. Any suggestion?

It was an amazing experience. I go to the page, see the Google Books link, make myself ready to buy it just because I want to reward the license decision and the ability to read it in plain HTML and than you hit the territorial wall of yesterday.

There will be a UK edition in some months time. Meanwhile, if you want to show your support, you can go to http://www.craphound.com where Cory is running a donation drive for libraries and teachers.

It's available for the Kindle or as a hardcover in the German Amazon store if that helps.

How can I be sure that the Kindle version in Europe isn't DRM laden? I won't buy any DRM-laden book under any condition. Well, hard cover is fine, but I already have one and a half room filled with books, I'd rather stop buying dead tree once and for all.

Would a VPN work for this scenario?

Yeah, probably. The most infuriating is that I own a nook color, and a B&N account, but I can't buy a digital book from them at all. Madness.

I think that the "Buy a copy for a school/library" suggestion is brilliant.

Because I can't buy the book DRM-free in the UK (so far as I can see), but I can make sure that some money goes to Charlie, Cory and the editors, etc. who put hard work into creating it.

Google Books UK carries the DRM-free version according to Boing Boing: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Rapture_of_the_Ner... and I imagine the DRM-free version on the iTunes store is also carried in the UK.

That page says that there is no ebook version available.

They may do in the US, but you can't buy it in the UK.

It _is_ a shame that it's only available on that page in HTML format. Usually the books that Charlie and Cory have released CC have been available in mobi, epub, etc.

I think the alternative formats are normally created by readers. They'll probably start to show up soon, or you could create and submit your own.

Edit: although unlike Cory's earlier books, this is under a NoDerivs license. It's possible that changes matters slightly...

Edit2: If you go to Cory's site (http://craphound.com/rotn/download/) it sounds like alternate formats are still an option (and indeed EPUB and MOBI are already there).

Aaah, perfect! Thanks!

The noderivs license is specifically to allow us to sort out commercial translations. Once these have happened (hint: this is a long term thing) we may well be able to relax the license.

We'll add epub, mobipocket, and other ebook formats as and when we have time.

Looks like the EPUB version was perhaps done hastily. Doesn't even have the correct cover image.

It's a great book. I bought it when it came out because I love both authors work so much.

The kindle edition is US only...

Hypothetically if you have a credit card that's not already registered with Amazon, create a new account, enter the mythical US address of your choice, purchase the book, and then rip it to a sane format via Calibre or whatever your tool of choice is you can get an ebook copy and give the author money at the same time.

Or read the CC copy and purchase the dead tree - which is what I'll be doing once my current reading queue empties.

Technical question: don't they confirm the address against the one that the credit card vendor has on file?

AMZN do that for app purchases. For books, not so much -- they're aware that folks may move from one country to another. They do ask you to confirm where you live, though, and I've heard anecdata about folks who change their country of residence too much getting cut off at the knees.

I've heard that to - which is why I... ahem... I mean why my hypothetical friend keeps a separate amazon account.

Early on with kindles before they had the rest of world kindle store you had to buy from the US store (As an early international kindle buyer I had a US account)

I migrated to the UK store as some books I wanted were in the UK store but not the US. So far I've not regretted this (some books are earlier in the US but some are earlier in the UK) I'm pretty sure you can migrate back but last time I looked I needed US address (easy as my sister lives in CT) and it wasn't obvious if my lack of US credit card would cause me problems later (since credit card auth checks often use addresses).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com