The My Projects I’ve Worked On, LOL Project

Cory Doctorow, man, he gave me a brilliant idea.

Why not give away a free ebook to the first book I ever published, Small Worlds: A Miscellany. It’s a book that has been compared to a Saturday Morning cartoon, but for the right audience… that might not be a bad thing. I’m not saying it’s the greatest collection of short stories and poetry ever collected… but hey, you can buy the paperback if you wanna, but if you don’t the free ebook didn’t cost you anything!

All this time I could have been raising awareness of this piece of junk I have for sale or best offer sitting in my garage, and now I regret not telling more people it existed. But be warned, it’s weird as hell. Weirder than what Twilight would be like if you replaced vampires with banshees. How weird? There’s a story in there where Osamu Tezuka uses the cel animation process mixed with modern technology to resurrect Walt Disney in cartoon flesh. So yeah.

If you like weird fiction, check it out, but keep in mind it collects the first things I ever wrote. Don’t expect anything too brilliant coming out of my emo years.

The full list of my teenage projects I published with Lulu.com is still developing, but I hope to have a complete list of my LOL inducing teenage fiction I used to publish with Lulu.com there soon.

Anyway, some of you might have been wondering if this changes my stance on the issue of scanlations and licensed anime and manga. Well, it kind of does. Because while buying a hard copy of a licensed manga allows you to read a book volume version of a manga series, and DVDs and Blu-Rays allow you to have a hard copy of anime shows and movies, the reality seems to be kicking in that eventually, people need to accept that region coding and DRM prevent people from enjoying cultural products the way they want, and how they should be enjoyed. Suing people also doesn’t work in terms of stopping millions of people downloading things illegally, so it’s interesting to note that DRM free ebooks might be the future of manga, because they allow for the widespread use of manga rather than keeping “content” in limited release. The scarcity of non-ebook products that don’t have DRM for example have caused people to scan and distribute Japanese light novels online because who wants to pay a hundred dollars for a used copy of Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto? Anime and manga distributors like Tokyopop and Viz Publishing shouldn’t be suing people and making their content harder to find, they should be finding better ways to distribute anime and manga in a DRM free format so that more people can enjoy the same cultural product, the same anime and manga everybody else is enjoying because it would be possible to find a digital copy of the product, which if people like it, they can make a donation to the artists and directors who made it. The scarcity of light novels is partly what drives piracy of them in the first place, and I recommend that a DRM free ebook of Welcome to the NHK would solve a lot of hurt, and make a start, at repairing trust in anime and manga translation companies that light novel fans have lost in being neglected by them so long. The same could be said of hard to find manga like FLCL and the elusive Card Captor Sakura.

We certainly live in interesting times don’t we?

(P.S.: I realise, Mr. Doctorow, if you’re reading this, that the ebooks listed have DRM. Please help me find a solution to remove the DRM somehow in your (possible) reply. Help a Little Brother out!)

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.