Open Media Review

Ben Rosenbaum Encouraging Remix of “The Ant King and Other Stories”

It is getting difficult to keep up with book and music releases that qualify as open content lately. Such a complaint to have, I know. I am way behind on both my reading and recommendations.

Ben Rosenbaum’s recent release of his short story collection, “The Ant King and Other Stories”, stands out, though. Ben is not unique in allowing derivative works in his license choice, but appears to being doing more than releasing the ebook for free and passively allowing works like translations. He’s started a contest explicitly to encourage remixing the work.

The details in a nutshell is he is giving readers six months to submit their works and he’ll reward his three favorites with signed and personalized hard cover editions. This sort of active engagement with an audience so far has been more common with independent musicians like Jonathan Coulton and Brad Sucks, perhaps because the idea of a remix of a song is a bit more obvious. Doing so has worked well for those artists, so hopefully it will also benefit Ben with some new and more interested readers.

I also recommend you check out the podcast of True Names, Ben’s collaboration with Cory Doctorow. I am a huge fan of this particular sub-sub-genre, stories of post-humans. Their collaboration brings a lot of unique and fun ideas to the mix, including a heavy bias towards deeply geek computer science conceits and inventive speculation on how completely virtualized humans may evolve into the far future.