Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

if I want to enable my readers push copies to their friends, and they're in circles like Slashdot, Wired, Boing Boing, who never meet face to face, just online, well i need to give it to them in a suitable format so they can do whatever they need to do with it. SMS, MMS, Email, FTP, Cut and Paste, P2P, all are valid.

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, ... and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners.