Hi everybody! This blog has been really quiet — I’ll spare everyone the details on this platform, but the last year and a half has been incredibly stressful. I’ll do a full update post soon, but first, an intro to my latest column; Little Free Archive.
LFA is a redux of something I initially started on Tumblr a few years ago; sadly, Tumblr decided to delete all of my (linked) blogs with no explanation given, and I lost both the blog and its archives. In essence, though, LFA is a love letter to the public domain and freely published work. As copyright becomes a minefield, late-stage capitalism requires all hobbies to be monetized, and the uneven distribution of the future becomes more and more apparent, it becomes difficult to talk about ‘access’. Who can really access something? If a book is in a library, what does that really mean? “In libraries” usually means, after all, “in American libraries”, or “in Anglophone/Western libraries”. Even ebooks are often region-locked and/or loaded with DRM. At the same time, writers are paid less than ever. At the time that this is being published, the Hollywood Writer’s Guild is on strike, what seems like only a short time after the HarperCollins strike and a near-miss on a catastrophic plan for a Penguin-Random House merger. Only best-sellers are carried in Barnes & Nobles, and Book Depository — one of the only mainstream site that shipped books internationally at all — has finally shut its doors. Piracy becomes the only option for thousands of readers, and thousands of writers watch the little bit of income they have slip away as a result.
The enemy, of course, is the engine of capitalism and its maintainers. But I would like to offer, and to remind others of, the third option. Work that is already in the public domain, and work that is already published free to read and enjoy, with options to support authors and publishers offered but not required. In pursuit of this, I’ll be posting short stories, poetry, occasionally novels, and other written texts that are offered for free. Feel free to send me links or make me aware of things that fall under the Little Free Archive’s criteria, listed below:
- Written-word only, fiction or non-fiction. So no webcomics (I love y’all but they’d take over so fast), no movies, no podcasts, no music. I encourage those with an interest in those media to make their own projects and I will gladly promote them.
- Access means access. If someone has to make an account, give any sort of banking detail, be part of an academic institution, etc. then it is not accessible and I cannot post it. Region-locks aren’t always obvious and may be discovered after the fact; I shall try to avoid them, and please let me know if any appear, but it will be on a case by case basis.
- Legal, or at least moral. While I am not anti-piracy per se, I want to encourage supporting authors; that means if a book wasn’t posted by the living author for free, then it should not be posted on here. There are exceptions to this:
- The author is deceased and there is an unclear status to their work. This is particularly common with queer authors; many from the 80s and 90s passed away with no clear inheritor, and even today, while an estate might be managed by someone, books themselves often languish, never being reprinted or re-uploaded.
- The author is deceased and their work should morally be in public domain. Ex. rare books from the 40s/50s/60s where they’re at risk of being lost, works where their copyright status has been artificially stretched by some means or another.
- Not accepted: The author is a terrible person. I would rather just not post these. (Pirate them all you want! But it’s sort of against the essence of the LFA.)
- While I won’t be doing much in terms of censorship, exercise some judgement in what you send. There are plenty of old books with extremely questionable racist depictions, for example, but I’m not posting a Nazi creed. (Nor will I post Gone With The Wind, in no small part because if you’re struggling to find it then you may be lost.) And I’m not going to stand here and say “don’t send anything with depictions of underage sex” and thereby discourage hundreds of coming-of-age novels or autobiographies, I’m not posting “My Fifth-Grade Teacher Likes Me! Adventures Of A Preteen Meganekko”.* Smut is fine, but give me a heads up if something is smut vs. “a story with smut in it”. Fanfiction is a no-go — see the access entry. If someone needs to read something else that probably costs money to understand something, it’s not accessible.
- Self-promote! Do it! If you wrote something for free online and you want me to show it to everybody, do it. But… don’t be a jerk. I will at least try to read everything I’m sent but I probably won’t be able to, and if I don’t get to yours for a while, it won’t be an insult. If I think yours is inappropriate to feature for some reason or another, it is likely not personal. (Much of the time, it’s because it’s a webcomic or on Kindle Unlimited, both of which are disqualified.) And return the favour: plug LFA and my blog somewhere too.
For the time being, LFA will run like one of my normal columns, and I’ll take some time to get back into the swing of things. I’ll figure out an indexing system (I need a better one in general) and then go from there.
[Speaking of late-stage capitalism: want to support me? I have a Patreon here!]
Elliott Dunstan 