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Comment by literalAardvark | Hacker News Reader

Cool but it's unfortunate that he was forced to do it for such a great book to live. It really is one of the best books of the last decades, in my humble opinion the best.

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What do you mean by "forced to do it"?

Watts has recently made Blindsight available online through a Creative Commons license, so you can check out the book before you buy. Or perhaps make that so you can read the book if you can't buy: What I find interesting about it is that he's calling the CC release "an act of desperation more than experimentation." Watts explains his thinking here (with additional thoughts here), but the short form is that according to Watts the book got a small first printing (3,700 copies), isn't being carried wasn't pre-ordered by the bricks and mortar stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble, is hard to find in the specialty book stores, and is on the bubble as toward whether there'll be a second printing of the book or not. By putting the book out in a CC online version, Watts suggests, at least people can find it and read it.

I'm citing from here which also contain links to the actual Peter Watts reasoning: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004689.html

That's a crying shame. It's an incredible book. I guess I got one of those 3,700 hardcovers. It's on my shelf next to the Echopraxia hardcover.

To clarify, since unaindz didn't use quotes, that entire paragraph is verbatim from Scalzi, which makes "recently" more explicable, as it dates from 2006.

I know I was thrown for a loop, since the book is (currently) very much in print, and you can find it in paperback on Amazon and BN.

The 2006 date is significant since it predates the Amazon Kindle (2007), which is where I bought my copy.

Aside: I have to agree with those same reviewers that Watts bemoans. Blindsight is fucking dense (but rewarding). I can't say I enjoyed it, but I'm glad I read it, and there are very few people in my friend circle I can imagine recommending it to.

now i am curious if publishing on the website helped or if it didn't make a difference.

one thing i am pretty sure though is that it didn't hurt.

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