On piracy and bootlegged copies of my books

Thursday, February 9, 2023

On a recent trip to Mumbai, India, comedian Simon Feilder became fascinated by how many bootleg copies of famous books were for sale in stalls around the city. So he bought a copy of a book he already owned to compare: Steal Like an Artist. He made this video about it:

Feilder asked me to be in the video, but I told him it was better without me! He cleverly found this old tweet and included it:

If you pirated STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST when you were young and broke now’s a great time to pay me back and get a fancy hardcover ?https://t.co/eIyOzSlrS9 pic.twitter.com/tBcwCL6hCE

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) March 8, 2022

I laughed, upon re-reading the tweet thread, how many people admitted that they had pirated it and now they were buying a copy. Success!

A batch of quick thoughts:

Cory Doctorow has always written well on this subject. (He often quotes Tim O’Reilly: “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”
As an author, you can think of every pirated copy as losing a sale, or you could think of it as gaining a reader. If you zoom out a bit, over the long run, gaining a reader is much more valuable than selling a book.
A bit bright-sided, perhaps, but there are some weird examples out there of how piracy actually leads to more sales. There are also historic texts that we wouldn’t have today if it weren’t for illicit copies.

All that said: Book sales keep my kids fed, man! Please buy them or borrow them from the library. (Remember: Libraries buy books! And you can often request that the library order a book you’re interested in.)

Roget’s Thesaurus: A library of words

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Roget’s Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus I’d ever picked up was alphabetical, and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.

“We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,” writes Roget’s biographer, Joshua Kendell. “But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.”

Read it here.

Going through the motions

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: If you don’t know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.

“Going through the motions” is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artist’s great secret for getting started.

As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:

If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.

Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will be something.)

For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.

Winter owl updates

Thursday, February 2, 2023

Here are some blind contour drawings of the two owls that are living in the box in the backyard.

A while back, I bought a cheap Gosky spotting scope with a smartphone adapter that let me take photos with my old iPhone SE. I keep it on the desk in my studio pointed at the box, but up until a week or so ago, I had to go out there to take photos manually or run the phone’s timelapse function.

Tonight’s ? ? footage really has it all: a ? visit, grooming, and flights #coconuttheowl pic.twitter.com/qkjmAppkCg

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) February 1, 2023

It occurred to me what I really needed was a 24/7 stream of the box. That led me to AlfredCamera, an iOS app that turns your old iPhone into a security camera. It’s a little buggy, and the image quality isn’t the best, but having 24/7 coverage with motion sensing and a low-light filter and the ability to play back footage has meant that I’ve gotten to witness all sorts of owl behavior I wouldn’t get to see otherwise.

The most adorable moments are when they’re perched in the box side-by-side, getting ready for their night of murder. Watching them try to squeeze into the opening is a great source of comedy:

Watching these two try to share the box at night is quite the comedy

? ? pic.twitter.com/iuLmb5r57K

— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) January 31, 2023

As for whether they stick around or not, we’ll just have to see.

If they do stick around, they often mate by the end of the month. Mama will lay eggs in March, at which point Papa will move about 14-20 feet away from the box to keep an eye on things. Once the owlets hatch, Papa will move closer, about 7-10 feet away, and in June the owlets will fledge.

You can see owl updates on Twitter or in my Instagram stories.