SF Signal: Doctorow: Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet

Doctorow: Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet

Cory Doctorow offers commentary at Locus Online called Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet in which he talks about technology, art and authors' relationships with readers. Here's an excerpt:

And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, "Will it be any good to our chosen medium?" Like I said, science fiction is the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It's the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere.
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I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF writer's biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn't know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version.