For years now, Cory Doctorow has been selling massive amounts of his books, which, oddly, he also gives away for free. That link is for Little Brother, probably his biggest book to date, which he's been making freely available since before it came out in a Tor books print edition. I assume his publisher thought he was crazy; I assume they tried to stop him; I can tell you with certainty that the fact that it's free hasn't stopped the independent (and thus generally full price) book store I work at from selling mounds of the same book in paper form. Cory Doctorow just knows what the heck he's doing, is all I can think.
So what he's doing now is making four different covered versions of the sequel to
Little Brother available. For
A Little Help he went to four different artists (some of them authors), did cover designs with them, and then made them available for printing on Espresso Book Machines, including the one at my store. You can call, email, go in person, what have you, and half an hour later hold your cover choice, still warm from the printer, in your hand.
That's pretty damn neat. That's the way of the future. Or
a way of the future, at least, and Cory's pretty good at figuring that kind of thing out.
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