Science fiction writer and BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has long been a proponent of digital distribution and a relentless opponent of overly restrictive licensing and non-value-adding intermediaries. While his books bear the imprint of major publishers, he also releases them on the Web for free. So the distribution strategy for his latest project, With a Little Help, is really just a natural extension of his approach, and yet, it also marks an interesting departure: this time, he's creating a range of physical and digital versions, with different production values and price points. Oh, and part of the text will be a balance sheet to inform discussions around digital/self-publication. Here's how Cory explains it:

With a Little Help is my first serious experiment in self-publishing. I've published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with publishers, and it's all been very good and satisfying and educational and so on, but it seems like it's time to try something new.

You see, I've always released my work under open licenses from the Creative Commons project, so that my readers could share and remix my works. A good number of these readers wanted to know why I didn't distribute the physical book as well, and see what a writer working on his own could do.

So here you have it. *With a Little Help,* consists of 12 stories, all reprints except for "Epoch," which was commissioned by the Ubuntu project's Mark Shuttleworth for $10,000 (this being the most expensive option for buying the book -- don't worry, there are cheaper editions).

You can get a paperback version from Lulu.com for $18 (and every month, Doctorow will add a new appendix with the latest balance sheet.) There will be a $275 limited-edition collector's hardcover, with high-end printing and original paper ephemera donated by various sf writers. An audiobook version is available for about ten bucks, with the stories read by folks including Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Jonathan Coulton, and Spider Robinson.

Or, as always, you can surf on over to the With a Little Help page on his web site and download the whole thing for free, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can also find links to all the other versions on the site.

It features an introduction by Jonathan Coulton, as well as a very interesting afterword on digital publishing by Doctorow's agent, Russell Galen. In addition to the stories which, of course, kick ass. Check it out.

Full disclosure: I have had the privilege of workshopping with Cory.