a pretty sharp guy, and I know as much about this
stuff as anyone out there. More to the point, trying stuff and doing research
yields a non-zero chance of success. The alternatives -- sitting pat, or worse,
getting into a moral panic about "piracy" and accusing the readers who are
blazing new trail of "the moral equivalent of shoplifting" -- have a *zero*
percent chance of success.

Most artists never "succeed" in the sense of attaining fame and modest fortune.
A career in the arts is a risky long-shot kind of business. I'm doing what I can
to sweeten my odds.

So here we are, and here is novel number two, a book called Eastern Standard
Tribe, which you can walk into shops all over the world and buy [
http://craphound.com/est/buy.php ] as a physical artifact -- a very nice
physical artifact, designed by Chesley-award-winning art director Irene Gallo
and her designer Shelley Eshkar, published by Tor Books, a huge, profit-making
arm of an enormous, multinational publishing concern. Tor is watching what
happens to this book nearly as keenly as I am, because we're all very interested
in what the book is turning into.

To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of
text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet,
a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using
personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of
bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice -- rip, mix
and burn! -- and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.

Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is run
by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the
e-book revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers
-- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing.
Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a
precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run
the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon
forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author,
changing the world in some meaningful way.

I'm unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a new practice of book,
readers. Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM
clients, over P2P networks. Put it on webse