I'm so glad about this, I could bust, honestly. Not just because they're finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because I'm raising a daughter here, dammit, and the surveillance and control mania in this country is starting to scare me bloodless. It seems like the entire police and governance system in Britain has fallen in love with DNA-swabbing, fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the off chance that someday you might do something wrong. In early 2008, the head of Scotland Yard seriously proposed taking DNA from five-year-olds who display "offending traits" because they'll probably grow up to be criminals. The next week, the London police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist.
America isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade. Britain's right there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds.
We need to be having this conversation all over the planet.
Like I said, the UK edition goes on sale on November 17 (ISBN: 978-0-00-728842-7). There'll even be a limited edition, signed hardcover for people who like their books all artifact-y. If you want to be notified when the book goes on sale, just drop me an email at [email protected] with the subject line LITTLE BROTHER UK EDITION.
OTHER EDITIONS
My agent, Russell Galen (and his sub-agent Danny Baror) did an amazing job of pre-selling rights to Little Brother in many languages and formats. Here's the list as of today (May 4, 2008). I'll be updating it as more editions are sold, so feel free to grab another copy of this file (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an edition you're hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy all the currently shipping editions.
Audiobook from Random House.
A condition of my deal with Random House is that they're not allowed to release this on services that use "DRM" (Digital Rights Management) systems intended to control use and copying. That means that you won't find this book on Audible or iTunes, because Audible refuses to sell books without DRM (even if the author and publisher don't want DRM), and iTunes only carries Audible audiobooks. However, you can buy the MP3 file direct from RandomHouse or many other fine etailers, or through this link
My foreign rights agent, Danny Baror, has presold a number of foreign editions:
Greece: Pataki
Russia: AST Publishing
France: Universe Poche
Norway: Det Norske Samlaget
No publication dates yet for these, but I'll keep updating this file as more information is available. You can also subscribe to my mailing list for more info.
THE COPYRIGHT THING
The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.
I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.
