Cory Doctorow has published his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Like his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory’s made his book freely available for download under a Creative Commons License.
Cory has a write up of what he’s trying to do:
The future is my business, more or less. I’m a science fiction writer.
One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present.
Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn’t mean that the book is dying
— no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of
Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying — but it does mean
that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive
and well: we’re reading our brains out! I just think that the complex
social practice of “book” — of which a bunch of paper pages between
two covers is the mere expression — is transforming and will transform
further.
(The comments are also quite worth reading.)