My new graphic novel for sale and as a free, remixable, shareable download

IDW have just published the collected issues of "Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now," a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers (and I do mean incredible: Dara Naraghi, Esteve Polls, Sam Keith, Robert Studio, J.C. Vaughn, Daniel Warner, Scott Morse, Paul McCaffrey, Paul Pope, Dan Taylor, Dustin Evans, Ben Templesmith, Erich Owens, Ashley Wood, James Anthony Kuhoric, Guiu Vilanova, German Torres, Danny Parsons, Robbie Robbins, Neil Uyetake, Chris Mowry, and Amauri Osorio).

As with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it's on a non-commercial basis. I've uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories "Craphound," "Anda's Game," "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," "After the Siege," "I, Robot" and "Nimby and the D-Hoppers."

Have at it! Link to "Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now" on Amazon, Link to free downloads of "Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now"

• [ChuckEye]

  Kudos on the shift to Share Alike licensing. I always thought the ND licenses on your earlier books were a bit hypocritical from someone who supports fan art/fiction/etc as much as you do.

  Thank you for explicitly giving us permission to play in your world.

• [randyqx]

  so where can i paypal?

• [Cefeida]

  Downloaded. Reading. Forwarding.( I get a curious satisfaction from sending my extremely piratey friends comic pdfs that are actually legal. :P)

• [lo]

  Cory,

  I made a first try at 29,5 Mb, that I find quite readable, but it is a personal advice.
  I just send you a link to it at your craphound’s address.
  If you fell it is ok, you can just add it to your archive.org post.

• [Jed Alexander]

  I downloaded the CBR–I thought if I got the big one the resolution would be of a higher quality but it’s not so great and it takes a long time to load on my G3. I suppose now I’ll have to buy the book…

  It might be nice if this thing were broken up into several, rather than one CBR.

  It looks great though. I especially like the Paul Pope cover. Very Kirby. Wish he’d drawn one of the stories. He would have been a good fit for Anda’s Game.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  @#16: Paul, you just volunteered to be the first seeder, I think?

• [scottfree]

  Cheers, Cory! Saw this on the ‘new this week’ list, but only had time to run into my local for the new Buffy and run out. Will spread the word. Comics are definitely the most impressive format…to me.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  Jed@10: “It might be nice if this thing were broken up into several, rather than one CBR.”

  Luckily it’s CC licensed — send me the URL once you’ve uploaded it and I’ll add it to the post!

• [insect_hooves]

  Holy flaming w00t balls, that’s awesome.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  Lo@14 — look forward to seeing the files! No, there aren’t any with the CC baked in, though you’re welcome to make one!

• [arkizzle]

  Cory Doctorow: The gift that keeps on giving.

  Bravo Sir!

• [Agent 86]

  Wow, yet another reason to take the weekend off. Anything added/subtracted from the stories (did they make ‘em their own) or is it a literal translation?

• [Egypt Urnash]

  So how do you manage taking something done in this compartmentalized a fashion and getting the appropriate permissions from everyone to CC it? Did the initial contract you signed with the comics company (before any artists or other writers were even involved) say “I WILL BE GIVING THIS AWAY ON THE NET WHEN IT’S DONE UNDER THIS CC LICENSE”?

• [ifireball]

  Now we know where to obscure technical question from a few days ago came from…

  Am I right in assuming the CBR file was generated from the PDF file and does not contain additional information or higher resolutions? The size difference is quite substantial…

• [Cory Doctorow]

  Ifireball — correct, sir. The filesize really ratcheted up when I ripped the PDF into PNGs. I imagine that a lot of that was rasterizing the type-pages, the rest just inefficiencies in the process. I’d love for someone to produce a smaller k-size version that retained the resolution and quality.

• [arkizzle]

  OK, I just had a quick once-over of the book, and it’s beautiful!

  The artists are all top notch, and it looks great! (Craphound especially).

  Thanks again to all involved :)

• [Robbo]

  Many thanks, Cory.

  Cheers.

• [lo]

  Cory,

  just looking at the images included in the pdf, they seem to never be bigger than 680×1020.
  So any rendition of the pdf with a greater resolution than that is complete overkill, at least for the graphic pages. Further more, it will generate graphical artifacts.
  For the “vectorial” part of the pdf, I think one should target a similar resolution, even if most comic book reader programs are happy with resolution changing page from page (as long as one read in one page mode, and not in two page mode).
  I’m currently looking at what I can do with my automated scripts, but I think the best result will be obtained by manually selecting the best possible rendition for each page.
  But one thing is sure : even if some part of the pdf is vectorial, the cbr is way to big.

  PS : if I succeed in producing a nice comic archive, it will be a cbz, not a cbr.

  PPS : Is there a version of the pdf mentioning the CC status of the book, instead of : All rights reserved ?

• [paul567]

  I think it’s pretty cool that this is put up on the Internet Archive, but with a file size of 205MB why not distribute via BitTorrent?