Dave wonders why, when Lessig’s Free Culture audio book barn-raising was so successful, we don’t get together an audio version of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Crazy as the first go-round was, I’d lead such an effort in an instant — not just because I think Cluetrain is an important navigation sign for any endeavor concerned about its future involvement with the Net, but also because I think the world of David and Doc and Chris (author of Gonzo Marketing, still crying out for a re-release with new promotional push), and if Rick Levine is a friend of theirs, well, he must be okay with me (if in fact he really exists and wasn’t just a clever way for someone to get a double share of royalties).
But Dave’s got to know there’s a pivotal difference between Free Culture and Cluetrain. Larry Lessig wrote Free Culture as an integral part of his campaign to fend off the corporatization of copyright, to encourage and nurture the free online culture that Disney et al. are committed to stifling (by the way, there are some evil frames on the Free Culture site — eww, nasty). As such, he published the book with a Creative Commons license that explicitly permits derivative works. The Cluetrain Conspiracy didn’t release their book under a CC license, (a) because that wasn’t an explicit point of their book (more like a corollary, or an inference), but especially (b) because CC licenses didn’t exist back in those olden times. So as it turns out, there’s not only a Cluetrain book, but also a commercial spoken-word CD (abridged) and cassette version (also abridged), not to mention the version available from audible.com.
So, much as I’d relish making an unabridged downloadable free-culture version of Cluetrain available for everyone, I’m not going there. Partly cause I don’t want to take food out of the mouths of their children, but mostly because I don’t need the RIAA or Perseus Publishing or Antonin Scalia showing up at my front door with a subpoena.
Great idea, though. What would we do with the call-outs?
Posted by AKMA at July 3, 2004 07:08 AM | TrackBackI don't think it's abridged, in spite of what Amazon says. Not much point in abridging a book that's already short. But maybe I'm wrong.
An interesting fact: the book was recorded, at our insistence, in our own voices. All four of us, I might immodestly say, did a pretty good job. So did the people editing out the flubs and stuff. It was an interesting process, recording the thing. Probably also an expensive one for the publisher.
I think it's a good idea to look into releasing the recordings as downloadable mp3s in any case. It would be interesting to see if they spur sales. The CD is currently #325,316 on Amazon. The cassette is #344,880. The paperback is #31,594. The hardcover is #1,013.
That last one is a nice number but also strange, since the hardcover been out of print for three years. Maybe Amazon bought a pile of them and continues to sell them from inventory. Maybe the 234 used and new copies, starting at $0.35, keep re-selling themselves, and count toward the ranking. If that's the case, perhaps it speaks well of demand for a second edition, or some kind of updated re-release, such as George Lakoff did with Moral Politics.
Posted by: Doc Searls at July 3, 2004 02:54 PMI bought the (an) audio version to listen to (after reading the book) on long a car journey in 2000. It was read by some guy (none of the gang of four) who was clearly unclued about technology because on a couple instances when the acronym LAN (local area network) popped up, I recall he said the letterified version L.A.N. instead.
Got in on Audible.com, i think.
Posted by: Gary Turner at July 4, 2004 05:06 AMAs always, I'm up for it. :-)
Posted by: Eric Rice at July 4, 2004 03:40 PMThere's also a free version of the book on the web: http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html. I'd be very happy to have a free audio version of the book available, too.
FWIW, technically, the authors can't give anyone permission to do this because we don't own the audio rights to the book any more (I believe).
Next time I do a book (if there is a next time), I'll try to reserve the rights for this type of folk audio version.
Posted by: David Weinberger at July 4, 2004 05:22 PM