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my book has cost me nothing. 
 
The thing about an e-book is that it\'s a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were \"My friend suggested I pick up....\" The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth. 
 
There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for this mad scheme? 
 
There\'s no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books--but I\'ve done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I\'ll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher\'s expectations. Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there\'s no way to be sure. 
 
What is certain is that every writer who\'s tried giving away e-books to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more. 
 
How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It\'s not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They\'re the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they\'re a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They\'re not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they\'re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them. 
 
What\'s more, science fiction\'s early adopters defined the social character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing, publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it\'s science fiction, the literature that coined the very word \"cyberspace.\" 
 
Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature online, through \"bookwarez\" channels that contained books that had been hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is SF. 
 
Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim O\'Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, \"being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement.\" I\'d rather stake my future on a literature that people care about enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the dominant medium of the century. 
 
What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future, electronic books will come to substitute more readily for print books, due to changing audiences and improved technology. I am skeptical of this--the codex format has endured for centuries as a simple and elegant answer to the
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