Eastern Standard Tribe, et al.
I recently finished reading Cory Doctrow’s most excellent book, Eastern Standard Tribe.
It turned out to be a real page turner, although not in the classic sense of the term. I’ll explain more about that later.
Doctrow’s vision of a not-so-distant and not-so-far-fetched society where people live, sleep, and socialize with one another across the street and around the world, joined by only common interests and syncronized circadian rhythms is foreign to many, but an affirmation for myself and many others.
Bloggers and denizens of message boards and chat rooms are intimately connected to their fellows. There’s always someone around who knows the answer, or knows someone who does. There’s always someone around to banter with, someone trolling, and many private conversations as well. People feel connected to each other in a tribal sort of way, even though some of them may be half a world away.
Why not, then, federate yourself with the people in your tribe?
Why not help them get their feet in the door, and afford them some measure of trust?
While it’s not the only theme, it underlies everything else. Loyalty to, and betrayal by, members of the Tribe.
And now, back to turning pages. This book, along with Doctrow’s first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and a collection of short stories called A Place so Foreign, is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which allows, as he puts it, “anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptations of [this] book that s/he can think of.”
This being the case, I proceeded to download a user-prepared html version of EST. The formatting was minimal: paragraphs, chapter titles, and not much else. The default serif font on a stark white background was very hard on the eyes, which is what I think turns a lot of people away from reading books in their electronic form. However, with a fairly minimal amount of effort and some CSS magic, I was able to transform the text into something much more pleasing. A sans-serif font, and text in boxes with a pleasing shade of grey for background. In this form I was able to read the whole, albeit short, novel in two afternoons.
For those interested, I have uploaded the versions of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” and “Eastern Standard Tribe” that I hacked together. They are available here and here.