The Pirate’s Dilemma: A Kung Fu Trilogy in Four Acts – Act 1: The Remix

Today is the day The Pirate’s Dilemma comes to a book store near you – a day I’ve been looking forward to for the last eighteen months, and it’s going to be a long one. I’ll be on The Brian Lehrer show at 11am, then doing lots of book signing around NY, and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven’t been told about yet, but it’s all good.

We’ve had a great run so far. The book has already received a 9 out of 10 review in Wired, was named one of Fast Company’s top five ‘Smart Books of 2008’, and BusinessWeek’s ‘Innovation of the Week.’ It’s been featured in local and national press up and down the country and there’s plenty more coming over the next few weeks and months. It’s been on all kinds of great blogs, featured everywhere from The New York Times/Freakonmics blog to streetwear site Hypebeast to U.K band Hadouken’s weblog. Seth Godin, the world’s biggest marketing writer, called it “stunning.” Frans Johansson, one of the planet’s finest innovation writers, called it “remarkable,” and Jeff Chang, one of the greatest music journalists of all time, described it as “a series of leaps of imagination (that) always lands with style.”

When I wrote this I thought people would be throwing tomatoes (still in their cans) at me for suggesting piracy is good for us, but I’ve been invited to speak up and down the country over the last few months, and been amazed and humbled by the positive reactions to the ideas in the book. It’s already doing well on pre-orders - I don’t know how many books can say they’ve been in Amazon’s top ten bestselling lists of ‘rap’ and ‘economics/free enterprise’ books at the same time, but The Pirate’s Dilemma is one of them.

Help me get up on that list this crucial first week by getting your copy today/tomorrow/sometime this week. If you have a blog/magazine/speech to make later today in New Hampshire – it would be great if you could get the book in there somehow. Purchase spares for your friends and loved ones, and strangers too. Even if you don’t care about piracy, or how the way we all use information is evolving, or how a nun in the 1940s invented disco, get one anyway. Even if you can’t read, the book is also great for lighting barbecues, stabilizing wobbly tables and eradicating small to medium sized rodents from your property. Do what you will with your copy, but help me make this year the year of the pirate.

One of the most exciting things happening today is the launch of the first of the four videos we made to celebrate/promote the ideas discussed in the book. Enjoy Act 1 of The Pirate’s Dilemma: A Kung Fu Trilogy in Four Acts responsibly above in all its YouTube grainy-ness, and also in full-flash glory here in a few hours. More on these later today and why they’re so different from other videos, but now I gotta sleep for a few hours.

All the best, and thanks for reading and sticking with me this far.

Matt