John Kessel's wonderful short story collection "The Baum Plan" free CC download

Posted by Cory Doctorow, April 15, 2008 10:30 PM | permalink

Gavin of Small Beer Press sez,

It's tax day in the USA and we all need cheering up. We're celebrating at Small Beer Press by publishing John Kessel's first collection of short stories in ten years, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, as well as releasing it as a free download in a number of completely open format -- with, of course, no Digital Rights Management (DRM).
The Baum Plan is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any remixing/interpretation/Web 2.0 huddly-cuddly noncommercial manner. The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats.

Kessel's a superb writer and this is an amazing collection -- well done, Small Beer! Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

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Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by lava

, April 16, 2008 6:14 AM

apparently financial independence involves a pistol and a lunch box..

Take a look at this

#2 posted by Paul Dreyer , April 16, 2008 7:51 AM

Sure! The gun is for robbing and looting, and the lunchbox is there because robbing and looting is hard work, and sometimes, you get hungry. Also useful for whacking a bank guard over the head.

I made a MobiPocket version of the book if anyone wants it. If someone would be willing to host it, I would appreciate it. My username at gmail if you can help.

Take a look at this

#3 posted by gobo

, April 16, 2008 12:01 PM

I always thought the Baum Plan for Financial Independence involved traveling to a magical land over the rainbow which doesn't use money at all! Or am I thinking of the wrong Baum?

Take a look at this

#4 posted by TharkLord , April 16, 2008 12:24 PM

I bought my copy!

Yeah, I know I could get it for free, but so much of my money gets leached out of my wallet by taxes, fees, surcharges, etc, supporting unpleasant forces of darkness that I feel I must support the forces of generosity with an infusion of corporeal gratitude.

And about the book...

- SPOILERESQUE -

This is a good example of why limiting copyright term extensions can have so many benefits. L. Frank Baum's works have been in the public domain for quite some time now. They have inspired so many fantastic sequels and variations. The themes and characters are so strong that a wide variety of authors and artists are still finding new inspiration from them.

I think artists should be paid well for their work, and maybe their children too. But after that, extending copyright control just ends up converting what was once a living, dynamic, creative vision into a conceptual zombie, propped up by corporations and lawyers.