A programmer’s paranoia

I’ve finished my first real book. Not 40 pages tales as in past but a book of nearly 250 pages. I love writing and I love writing of cyberpunk worlds. My book is inspired by tales of P. K. Dick, W. Gibson, G. Orwell and B. Sterling. I’m very proud of it. I’ve sent a preliminary version of it in a nice LaTeX printed double spaced paper version to 3 of the biggest companies that produce books here in Italy.

All of them sent me this kind of response:

Your book is good (insert stuffs here) but in this moment our company do not want to produce your work (insert stuffs here) cause we have other prerogatives.

This didn’t hurt me at all. As Escher painted only for himself I write only for myself. But I will be happy to see my book on a library with a beautiful cover on it. You think it’s strange? Well I think the same thing.

I am not a person that read a lot. In all my life I could have read something like ~150 books for my personal pleasure (not scholastic books) and right now I read only 1 book every month. I do not follow contemporary books productions so I can’t understand what are today “prerogatives”. I think that I must take a look at the table of “new books” when I go at my library. I’ll check it out one of those days.

I’m trying to catalog the books I own as well as I’m trying to buy all the books I’ve read but that I currently do not own. If you are curious about the work in progress here you can find my BibTeX file. I’ve used on the files some extensions that do not fits well in standard BibTeX but every modern TeX distribution will have no problem with it (teTeX, MicTeX etc).

I’m seriously thinking about releasing my book to public domain but I’m pretty confused right now. If I made this step there’s no way back (I don’t know how copyright law applies to publications). We’ll see.