Readercon and E-Books (Part 1)

First of all, let me say that Readercon was great this year—which I measure primarily by the enjoyable and interesting people I talked to. A partial list would include Jim Kelly, Rob Sawyer, Ann Tonsor Zeddies, Geary Gravel, Rosemary Kirstein, Tom Easton and his wife Kate Savage (who let me hold an Amazon Kindle in my hands for the first time, and even put some of my books on it!), Michaela Roessner, Terry McGarry, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jim Freund, Judith Berman, Victoria McManus, Dan Kimmel, and—neither last nor least—a bunch of members of the writing workshops I've led with Craig Gardner. In that latter group, Chris Howard was positively glowing. His first novel, Seaborn, is just out. It looks terrific. (Two short sections of it went through critique in our workshop.) And Chris figured he'd made it—because his book was already pirated and up on someone's BitTorrent site. And probably was before the print version was even available.

Whatever you think about that last, good or bad—congratulations, Chris!

On the subject of e-books and piracy, I participated in a lively panel on the subject of e-piracy versus the rising trend of folks making their work available for free online. Our panel moderator was James Patrick Kelly, who has been in the forefront of putting his work up in audio format, initially as free podcasts, which eventually led to a paid appearance on audible.com. We batted around a lot of ideas on the subject—which I promise I will talk about tomorrow. It's late now. Time to get some sleep.

"I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn't, I would die." —Isaac Asimov