A marketing exercise
Despite the fact that writers have been giving their books away on the internet since, oh, about five minutes after the internet existed, there's a paucity of data on the subject of how books spread and who reads them. I'd like to go some way towards remedying this.
I'm going to place the text of Accelerando on this website in a couple of days. My server logs will tell me how many people download the book. A script I hacked together that polls Amazon.com's web services API will tell me how the book is selling. (One may assume that what goes for Amazon also goes for other booksellers.) But I don't know how downloads from my site reflect the real body of readers: is a surge in sales related to a surge in downloads three days earlier, or to something else? In the interests of joining up the dots, I'm therefore going to conduct a little experiment. (You may opt out of it if you don't want to participate – details below.)
The novel will be distributed in a variety of formats, including HTML (as a web page). The HTML version contains a web bug: an invisible image that calls my server whenever it is loaded by a web browser with internet access. This will (I hope) give me a crude count of the number of people reading the book, as opposed to the number who download the HTML file from this site.
I'm not going to collect any information about you, other than the raw fact that someone opened the file at a given date and time. Indeed, collecting individually identifiable information would be illegal under UK law without my complying with the Data Protection Act and related regulations. Nevertheless, if you still feel I'm infringing your privacy you have my permission in advance to (a) download and read the file on a machine that isn't connected to the internet, or (b) to chop out the offending web-bug. (It's right at the end, along with a helpful comment.) But please don't redistribute copies of the file from which the bug has been removed. Doing so will skew my figures, and potentially make it harder for me to argue the case for releasing future novels as free downloads with my editors.
This is a copyright notice
I'd prefer not to have to say all this, but my publishers will probably yell at me if I don't, so here goes:
If you've ever bought a house, you've probably seen a deed of sale for a chunk of real estate. Page after page of inscrutible legalese, complete with crossings-through and footnotes and sidenotes and whatever. When you sign your name in blood on the bottom of the last page against the signature of the vendor, it is generally taken as meaning that you "own" the house, but if you get into the small print it's a lot more complicated than that.
Ownership of a novel is like ownership of a house. I wrote "Accelerando" and I "own" the copyright on it, but I'm like a landlord who owns a plot of land, then sells the right to build on it and live in the building to someone else. Worse still: to several different folks on different continents at the same time. The "tenants" are publishers, who take the unformed land (the book) and turn it into something people enjoy using. And they like to sublet the property for money to other tenants -- the reading public. They don't want squatters moving into the attic and setting up home without paying them -- or worse, claiming to have owned the land all along.
So, to explain the copyright situation of this website: everything except the novel is covered as follows:
Unless specifically noted to the contrary on individual pages, the textual content of this website is © Charles Stross, 2005. The images on this website are © their original creators. Unless specifically noted to the contrary on the individual pages, the text and layout of this website (but not the novel "Accelerando") is licensed under the terms of the Creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Got that? It's nice and simple and about as easy as it gets. You shouldn't reuse the book cover art without getting permission from the publishers (Ace in the US, Orbit in the UK), but I don't much care what you do with the rest of the website as long as you credit me as the original author. Exceptions may apply to individual files, as noted on the pages concerned.
The big exception is the novel "Accelerando", which is covered separately.
"Accelerando" is © Charles Stross, 2005. The downloadable version on this website is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license .
What this means in a nutshell is: you can download it. You can read it, and give a copy (under exactly the same terms) to your friends. You must not sell it, modify it (other than converting to a different file format for storage or reading) or file off the serial numbers and pretend you wrote it. You must specifically not create derivative works such as movies or TV adaptations or role-playing games or translations into other languages, without obtaining a separate commercial license. If you do any of these things, I and/or my agent and publishers will come after you with lawyers, guns, and money -- but mostly lawyers.
If you do want to obtain media, translation, or other subsidiary rights -- whether commercial or non-commercial -- you should contact me; I'll say one of "yes", "no", or "talk to my agent".