Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

23 May 2009, 0:31 a.m.

Sold Out

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2009 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Wow. Gave or sold a few copies of Thoughtcrime Experiments to contributors & friends, sold several more to strangers (especially after they viewed the flyer I made), and am holding on to a single copy to show off.

I had foolishly thought most people would say, "Well, it's nice that you have a paperback version, and I'm glad I'm getting to browse it, but I'd rather avoid clutter and read it online or on my ebook reader." However, most people here do not live in tiny New York City apartments, and they prefer the experience of reading on paper, and find $3 or $5 an eminently reasonable price for 178 pages. And many come to a con to stock up on paper books, at the dealer's room and at free book tables. I also get the sense that people want to support our effort, and believe that buying the book shows that support. I'm trying to find a nice way to tell such people that the support we want is links, reviews, remixes, and copycat projects.

Skud pointed out that, since Leonard and I technically hold the copyright on the anthology (see p. 2 of the PDF), we could try to profit off it while the CC license (Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike) prevents anyone else from doing so. I replied, "We're not going to pull an Ubuntu One."

Comments

Julia
http://www.m14m.net/julia
23 May 2009, 9:17 a.m.

As someone who just received the paperback in the mail, I am not at all surprised.

Fafner
http://m14m.net/haberdash
23 May 2009, 10:01 a.m.

Hey, I live in a tiny New York apartment, and I bought two (one to read in the bathtub, one to give away), after reading the whole ebook online.