(1) LUCAS MUSEUM. NBC Los Angeles was there for Wednesday’s ceremony: “George Lucas’ $1 Billion Museum Breaks Ground in Exposition Park”.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts in Exposition Park is beginning to take shape in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park area.
Filmmaker George Lucas and wife Mellody Hobson were at a groundbreaking Wednesday for the $1 billion museum. The museum will house works by painters such as Edgar Degas, Winslow Homer and Pierre-Auguste Renoir; illustrations, comic art and photography by artists such as Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth; as well as storyboards, props and other items from popular films. It will be a “barrier-free museum” where “artificial divisions between `high’ art and `popular’ art are absent,” according to the museum’s website.
“It will be beautiful. It will be 11 acres of new parkland here,” Hobson said. “Everyone always wonders why we are doing so much to make this building stand out. George said, ‘I want an iconic building. I want a child to look at this building and say I want to see what is inside of that building.’ The building itself is a piece of art that will be in this park that we’re creating for this entire community and the world.”
The museum plans to feature a five-story building with 300,000 square feet of floor area for a cafe and restaurant, theaters, office space, lecture halls, a library, classrooms, exhibition space and landscaped open space.
Lucas told a CBS News interviewer:
Movies, including the “Star Wars” series, will be featured in exhibits showing what it takes to make a film, from set designs to character and costume sketches. There will be film storyboards and comic art. But the museum will also display paintings by Renoir, N.C. Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell – all from Lucas’ private collection.
“I think more people will come in for Rockwell than will come in for ‘Star Wars,'” Lucas said.
“Norman Rockwell can tell a whole story in one picture,” Lucas said.
“When were you captivated by Rockwell?” Blackstone asked.
“When I was 8 years old… I wanted to be an illustrator. I wanted to be able to do that,” Lucas said. “I wanted to be able to do pictures that have a message that appeals to a lot of people.”
Art that tells a story inspired him to tell stories. That narrative art is what Lucas will share in his museum.
(2) ANNIHILATION. Camestros Felapton has eyeballed the evidence and delivered his verdict: “Review: Annihilation (movie 2018 – Netflix)”.
The film (which had a very limited cinema release in the US and then a Netflix release internationally) is a different creature than the book. Events have been changed, plot elements removed, characters adjusted and the structure of the story altered. All of which seems to have been a good idea. The film carries the same sense of paranoia and wonder as the book and the same theme of people trying to cope when confronted with the incomprehensible. However, it has been remade into its own thing – a story with its own structure and characters that shares DNA with the book but which follows its own course.
(3) HELP WANTED. Journey Planet wants contributors for a Star Wars theme issue —
Regular Editors Chris Garcia and James Bacon, joined by Will Frank, have set out to create an issue of Journey Planet dedicated to the legendary Star Wars Universe. The issue, set for a May 4th release, will look at the films, the universe, the fans, the books, the comics, the toys, the Irish Connection and the meaning of the greatest of all science fiction franchises!
We want to hear from you if you are interested in contributing. We have an instant fanzine and are soliciting pieces, from short pieces on the first time you saw the films, about your massive collection of Star Wars figures (Mint-on-Card, of course)
We already have a beautiful cover by Sarah Wilkinson.
Please contact — [email protected]
Tell us what you’d like to write about. Then content submission Deadline is April 17th
And may the Force be with you!
(4) HAL/ALEXA. So how is this invention supposed to parallel the workings of HAL-9000 – by preventing people from getting back into their homes? The Verge tells us “This replica of HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey comes with Amazon’s Alexa built in”.
HAL-9000, the malevolent supercomputer at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, is an icon of science fiction cinema. So much so, that if you ask any one of the virtual assistants to “Open the pod bay doors,” they’ll dutifully parrot HAL’s lines from the movie back at you. Now, Master Replicas Group wants to take that step a bit further, turning HAL into a virtual assistant that can control your home.
The company name might be familiar to prop and costume fans: the original Master Replicas produced a range of high-quality props from franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek before going out of business a decade ago. If you’ve seen someone swinging around a lightsaber, there’s a good chance it’s one of Master Replicas’ props, or based off of their models. The new company is made up of several former employees, who are getting back into the prop replica business with a new range of products, including an interactive replica of HAL.
This isn’t the first time that someone’s thought about putting HAL into your home’s smart devices: a couple of years ago, fan prop-maker GoldenArmor made its own version that allows someone to mount it over their Nest thermostat. MRG’s prop goes a bit beyond that. It recently obtained the license from Warner Bros. to create an exact replica of the iconic computer, and while most prop replicas are static recreations of a movie or film prop, this version is designed to be interactive, using Amazon’s smart assistant, Alexa.
A humorous video simulating “If HAL9000 was Amazon.com’s Alexa” has already gone viral —
(5) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 15, 1956 — Forbidden Planet premiered.
- March 15, 1967 — Frankenstein Created Woman stitched together a story for the theaters.
- March 15, 1972 — Slaughterhouse Five was first released theatrically.
(6) IS IT VINTAGE? Mark Kelly considers the sequel to Dandelion Wine in “Ray Bradbury: FAREWELL SUMMER”.
RB provides an afterword to this book, also, in which he explains where this book came from. In the mid 1950s (several years after the successes of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN) he submitted a manuscript to his publisher, Doubleday, for the book that became DW. But that original manuscript was too long and his editor suggested cutting it. RB quotes his reply (p210 in FS): “ ‘Why don’t we published the first 90,000 words as a novel and keep the second part for some future year when you feel it is ready to be published.’ At the time, I called the full, primitive version The Blue Remembered Hills. The original title for what would become Dandelion Wine was Summer, Morning, Summer Night. Even all those years ago, I had a title ready for this unborn book: Farewell Summer.”
With DANDELION WINE such an entrenched classic, it’s difficult to imagine how the content of FAREWELL SUMMER could have been incorporated into it. That would have been a completely different book. As it came to be, DW has a perfect story arc, across one summer in the life of a 12-year-old. Yet even as a leftover, on its own, FS is a quite different, a rather oddly amazing and moving, book.
(7) WHEATON MEETS SHATNER. In this video, Wil Wheaton acts out meeting William Bleeping Shatner when ST:TNG was in its second season.
The filming of Star Trek 5 happened only a few doors away from Star Trek The Next Generation, Giving Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher) the chance to meet his idol William Shatner, it didn’t go as well as he had hoped…
(8) LAST-MINUTE CAMPAIGNING. We’re annually snowed under by award eligibility posts, but it’s strange to see them still arriving with less than 24 hours left to nominate, when voters no longer have time to read/listen to the person’s recommended body of work.
Lawrence Schoen urges consideration of his Eating Authors blog:
Every Monday morning*, since June of 2011, I’ve put out a blog post featuring authors and their most memorable meals. That’s more than 350 stories of incredible food, amazing dinning companions, astonishing circumstances, and remarkable settings.
And Crystal Huff points to a year’s worth of tweets:
Right! Multiple people have pinged me about my eligibility for the #HugoAwards Fan Writing category. One friend even put together a list of tweets to show me I had, in fact, done a fair bit of writing for #fandom in 2017. So here comes… a thread of threads! pic.twitter.com/c59bevafmJ
— Crystal M. Huff, ? ? (they/them) (@crystalvisits) March 15, 2018
(9) POOP HAPPENS. From Pitchfork we learn: “Neil Young Writing a Sci-Fi Novel Called Canary”.
Neil Young recently sat down with Rolling Stone’s Patrick Doyle to discuss his role in the upcoming film Paradox. In the midst of the interview, he opened up about the sci-fi novel he’s been writing. It’s called Canary, and Young said it focused on a power company employee who gets caught exposing the corruption at his workplace. “He discovers the solar company he works for is a hoax,” he explained. “And they’re not really using solar. They’re using this shit—the guy who’s doing this has come up with a way to make bad fuel, the bad energy, this really ugly terrible stuff, and he’s figured out a way to genetically create these animals that shit that gives the energy to make the [fuel]. So he’s created this new species. But the species escapes. So it’s a fuckin’ mess. It’s a long story.”
Young said he already has a New York agent on board with the project, but didn’t share a possible publication date. He also got candid when it came to the topic of retirement tours. “When I retire, people will know, because I’ll be dead,” he said. “I’m not gonna say, ‘I’m not coming back.’ What kind of bullshit is that? I could go out and play if I felt like it, but I don’t feel like it.”
(10) SHETTERLY. Are Will Shetterly’s and Jon Del Arroz’ situations alike? JDA evidently thinks so.
This is disgraceful by another mob running a convention treating a veteran author like this. These cons need to stop policing author speech and get back to celebrating SF/F! #WeAreAllShetterly #FreeWill https://t.co/NAEg55lnLe
— Jon Del Arroz (@jondelarroz) March 16, 2018
(11) YO HO NO. Fraser Sherman is teed off: “Books are too expensive, so it’s okay to pirate them. Oh, really?”
I have no sympathy for this crap. In the many years I did the struggling-writer shtick, I saw lots of books I couldn’t afford. I didn’t steal copies. I wouldn’t do it if I were still struggling. If it was a paper copy, would they shoplift it from Barnes & Noble if they thought it was overpriced? Or how about a restaurant — if the service takes too long (the “they don’t release it fast enough” argument), does that mean they’re entitled to steal food from the salad bar? Soft drinks cost a fraction of what they sell for, does that make it okay to steal them? Or movie tickets — lord knows those are outrageously priced, but does that justify sneaking in without paying?
(12) THE JEOPARDY BEAT. Rich Lynch says tonight’s episode of Jeopardy! included this answer:
A contestant got it right.
(13) GOT OBSIDIAN? “Changing environment influenced human evolution”: a site in Kenya is “the earliest known example of such long distance [25-95km] transport, and possibly of trade.”
Early humans were in the area for about 700,000 years, making large hand axes from nearby stone, explained Dr Potts.
“[Technologically], things changed very slowly, if at all, over hundreds of thousands of years,” he said.
Then, roughly 500,000 years ago, something did change.
A period of tectonic upheaval and erratic climate conditions swept across the region, and there is a 180,000 year interruption in the geological record due to erosion.
It was not only the landscape that altered, but also the plant and animal life in the region – transforming the resources available to our early ancestors….
(14) STORAGE WARS. That stuff sure looked familiar…. “Police: Marvel fan spotted his $1.4M collection for sale online”.
Police in California said two men were arrested on burglary charges after a man discovered his $1.4 million collection of Marvel super hero memorabilia for sale online.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office said the Rancho Cucamonga Police Department responded Feb. 22 to a storage facility where a man discovered his collection of Marvel collectibles had been stolen after he was made aware that some of his items were listed for sale online.
(15) LATE NIGHT NERDS. Joel Zakem spotted this TV highlight: “Steven Colbert talks to Paul Giamatti about Science Fiction and used book stores during the first 5 minutes of this interview from yesterday’s Late Show. It’s probably the only time you will hear Henry Kuttner and Avram Davidson mentioned on late night TV.” — “Paul Giamatti And Stephen Are Science Fiction Nerds”
‘Billions’ star Paul Giamatti gets some gifts or reading assignments from Stephen, depending on how you look at them.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Joel Zakem, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Owlmirror.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
(14) STORAGE WARS
It could just be loose writing, but the story seems to imply the victim only he’d been robbed of $1.4M worth of stuff after it was advertised for sale, which is….weird.
(11) YO HO NO.
Shorter version: if you want good books help their authors get paid!
(10) SHETTERLY.
Credit where it’s due: #FreeWill is quite funny hashtagging.
(2) ANNIHILATION
I won’t spoiler the film here, but the decision to not give it much of a release seems quite shortsighted. There are parts I’d really like to have seen on the big screen, and while I can see which elements probably worried studio execs I don’t see them as any less commercial than, say, Arrival and that did very well for itself.
ETA: unexpected first!
@Mark —
14) I didn’t really find it too odd — he’d had his collection in storage, and he didn’t know the storage had been broken into until he saw the collection online. Sounds pretty reasonable — he just didn’t check his storage very often.
And to the thieves I say, stupid will get ya every now and then. I only wish stupid got people caught more often!
10) Everyone could see that coming, right?
@Contrarius
Okay, I’ll amend it to “who keeps $1.4M worth of stuff in storage that doesn’t get regularly checked to see if it’s been burgled?” then 🙂
@Contrarius: you may enjoy a podcast called Dumb People Town. It’s all about dumb people doing dumb things and getting caught (often by dumb cops or other dumb people). Not all of it’s illegal/criminal activity – sometimes it’s a harmless dumb person who tries to throw a poo out of a window and ends up stuck in said window. Other times it’s someone who tries to rob a bank with a finger pistol, gets blasted by a dye pack and strips naked in the street.
10) “Free Will”? From what!?
@Mark —
Quick answer: a rich person. 😉
@Oneiros —
LOL.
I bet I know one recent video that’s on the site: the one where two would-be burglars walk up to a convenience store with bricks. One of them throws a brick towards the door of the store, but instead of hitting the door he hits his buddy’s head and knocks him out. The surveillance tape shows him dragging the guy away. That’s karma for ya!
Oh, I forgot to mention earlier, related to the “Boaty McBoatface” story from yesterday: I heard today that there’s a bridge somewhere in TN — I wasn’t paying attention where — that will be renamed “Bridgey McBridgeface” for just one day. April 1, of course. 😉
We’ve got trainy mctrainface in Sweden.
(8) LAST-MINUTE CAMPAIGNING.
Almost nothing in that tweet stream is actually eligible for Fan Writing.
And lists of just books and authors as “Fan Writing”? Reeeeeeeeally??? You know that your oeuvre of Fan Writing is woefully inadequate when you’re bragging about that. 🙄
11) In a very mild counterpoint to this… I bought a tremendous number of second-hand books when I was a teenager because new books were expensive, and every argument against piracy also applies to second-hand books. Or libraries. Or borrowing from your friends. (I’m told, though I don’t have a link, that in the 1930s the American publishing industry ran a campaign against “book sneaks” who borrowed instead of buying.)
On the other hand, I’m entirely behind the idea that authors should be able to live comfortably, and until we achieve my preferred solution of fullly automated luxury gay space communism that means giving them money somehow… The pragmatic solution is probably the status quo: accept personal piracy as a form of borrowing, combat commercial piracy, and blame your poor sales on a publishing system that seeks to maximise profit.
When I was unemployed and more or less broke, I spent the money I could on books and comics. And when I had no money left, I pirated. Without any shame. And when I got employed again, I stopped all pirating at once.
I will not be ashamed of this in any way, because I do not think that being poor is a reason to have an awful life.
2) As I noted on Cam’s blog, it was wonderous creepy, gorgeous to look at…but I found there were a lot of missing character beats.
As Mark above notes, though, I do think it deserves a wider release than its getting.
@1: is there a plan anywhere showing where “11 new acres of parkland” are coming from? Combining Googlemaps with the renderings on the museum website suggests he’s taking over a couple of parking lots amounting to ~4 acres, and maybe turning an acre of street into a tunnel.
Interesting ~local note: a financially-pinched museum west of me is getting flak for selling some Rockwells to some other non-profit museum — unnamed, but the Rockwells in the announcement have to come from somewhere. (Locals are claiming the museum could increase admission revenue with better special exhibits, neglecting to explain where the money to put on the exhibits would come from.)
The new museum sounds like it could be interesting; I’ll hope for reports from Filers who visit.
@9: boy, does that sound unpromising.
@10: I really hope Shetterly has enough nous left not to take that bait.
@Contrarius:
Just so. I know someone who I was told had five storage lockers full of books; I also have some idea what they earn (and they do earn it). Acquisitiveness and hoarding don’t disappear with money; they’re just more presentable.
@Ghostbird: every argument against piracy also applies to second-hand books. Is the used-car market similarly illegitimate? Some books will get passed around, but that chain starts with the book being paid for. (Note Scalzi’s endorsement of libraries, in the link in the article.) The publishing industry’s saying a thing does not make that thing so.
@Hampus Eckerman: No libraries where you were?
Clip Hitchcock: During that time, not with SFF books in English.
@Chip Hitchcock Is the used-car market similarly illegitimate?
Similarly legitimate, in my view. But it’s interesting how the ethical stance changes when it’s a industrial product, isn’t it? (ObSF: Fred Pohl’s “Midas Plague” stories, where the argument’s reached its logical conclusion and consumption is a duty.)
11) I don’t pirate books and have a knee-jerk reaction against piracy. On the other hand, I also *buy* maybe 2-4 books a year; I am an enthusiastic patron of several libraries and also make much use of the little free libraries that seem to have sprung up on every block. I’ve come to realize that the friends I have who pirate ebooks are often *also* the friends I have who spend thousands of dollars on books each year. They just like acquiring books, frequently and by whatever means is most convenient in the moment for any given volume. I am not sure it makes much sense for me to get on my high horse and scold them about piracy when they are ultimately doing far more to financially sustain the publishing industry than I am.
@Ghostbird I take it this is not the case in your location, but in many places authors do get paid for library loans. In the UK, for instance, there is something called Public Lending Rights which gives authors (and illustrators) the right to be paid when their books are borrowed from a public library.
I would just like to say that I am totally eligible for Fan Writer and you should all rush out and nominate me without reading my stuff. (Because if you do read it, you won’t nominate me. I’m nobody’s fool, you know. I belong to the world.)
Wonders: Morality of using PLR to mitigate piracy? I much prefer reading on an eReader to a physical book these days. Am I allowed to take the book out of the library, return it the same day (thinks, is there a minimum loan period required to prevent people gaming the PLR by borrowing and returning a book they’ve written several hundred times a day/) but actually read a file obtained by nefarious means?
@Steve Wright
Which reminds me, I need to catch up on your blog. 🙂
/done-nominating-finally-Stalked…
We have ways of making you Stalk.
@O. Westin
I’m based in the UK but I skipped Public Lending Right as an unnecessary complication since I don’t think many other countries do it? But yes, PLR is a small but important step on the road to Fully Automated Luxury etc.
@NickPheas I seem to recall Scalzi talking about buying CDs by artists he likes and wants to support, but listening to them on Spotify for the sake of convenience, which as far as my vague moral compass goes is sort of the same thing (except that Spotify is legal, and pretend they’re paying the artists).
I must confess I think format-shifting (ripping CDs/DVDs, digitizing vinyls/cassettes, or scanning books) content you have already paid for is morally defensible, at least when you do it yourself, and keep the digital copy only as long as you own the physical medium.
Grabbing an official digital copy when you own the physical is a lighter shade of grey, and grabbing illicitly produced digital copies is a darker one. Where exactly the dark side begins is left as an exercise to the reader, as is the question of whether dealing is absolutes is Sith.
Just dropping a note to say THANK YOU to everyone who posted rec’s in the 2017 Recommended SF/F List. I just spent some time reading back through it, and was reminded of a few works that I would have kicked myself for not nominating. I wasn’t always as good at WRITING DOWN what I loved as I read it; there were some memory-joggers there that really helped. (HOW could I have forgotten “Sun, Moon, Dust” by Ursula Vernon?!?)
You all have made my nominating ballot better, and I appreciate it more than I can say.
@Ghostbird – re: second hand books
I agree with you that the conceptual ethical line between reading a second-hand physical book and reading a pirated e-book is so fuzzy as to be lost somewhere in a heavy fog. The thing that has struck me about ethics in the electronic age is that more recent developments point out how much of our [speaking very broadly and including myself in the “we”] adherence to ethics has been shaped by logistics and convenience. When the logistics of doing something that is technically less ethical are a significant barrier, it’s easier to follow a “pure” path. When the logistics of being unethical become simpler, I see a tendency for many people to rationalize “if it’s easy, it must be ok.”
My usual favorite example of this is photocopying out-of-print reference books. A misdeed that I have been very complicit in over my lifetime. Given the situation where a book is out of print and where second-hand copies are ruinously expensive (often the case with reference works of the sort I like), making a “for own use” photocopy starts looking like a rationalizable option. And back when photocopies were 10 cents a page in a coin-op machine in the library, there was a very practical disincentive to overdoing it, because you rapidly hit the same “ruinously expensive” price point while getting a much inferior product.
Lower the photocopy price to 1 cent per page, better quality photocopies, and sheet feeding machines, and now you can create an underground industry of people making master copies and easily running off 2nd generation copies for networks of friends. (My participation in these underground networks was primarily as part of SCA research networks.) We paid lip service to the unethicalness of what we were doing, but again pointed to books being out of print and ruinously expensive in the second-hand market — plus there weren’t enough second-hand copies in the market for everyone who wanted them. Being “easier”, we participated in the system more frequently, and had a stronger incentive to rationalize away any sense of wrong-doing. There was still a logistical bar to unchecked piracy: running off the photocopies took time, and there was still money involved. Plus there was physical shipping costs.
Now you move to e-books, whether obtained as such, or maybe one of those original photocopies has been converted to pdf. Now circulation of exact copies has no logistical bar at all. And the gradual process of copying becoming easier and cheaper, step by step, has trained us to avoid thinking of the ethics in absolute terms.
I really do think that the entire slippery slope was driven by a relationship between “easy” and “ok”. The easier it was to do something, the more we wanted it to be ok. This isn’t just me doing a thought experiment; I’ve seen many arguments about book copying (along the whole evolution) where that thread could be traced. To me, it suggests that we need to do more overt discussion of ethics as a society, because we can’t rely on logistical difficulty to guide people into the paths of righteousness. (There are parallels here in regard to violence and killing, but I don’t want to poke that wasps’ nest.)
@Ghostbird: Canada has PLR too, as well as a payment from the copyright collective to represent income lost to copying.
@Ghostbird every argument against piracy also applies to second-hand books. Or libraries. Or borrowing from your friends.
No, it doesn’t. Authors deserve to get paid for new copies of their work, not new readers. (U.S. copyright law acknowledges this by the First Sale Doctrine.)
When you read a library book, or a second hand copy, or a borrowed copy (presuming the original owner obtained it legitimately), the author got paid for the copy you are reading. If you are reading a torrented copy or a libgen copy or a Calibre-ripped copy, the author hasn’t been paid.
My Very Educated Mother Just Scrolled Us Nine Pixels
#15: As the interview said, this wasn’t the first time they talked about SF. In February 2017, at the 6:28 mark in this 9 minute 20 second video except from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (CBS-TV), authors mentioned include Asimov, de Camp, Dick, Ellison, Heinlein, Kuttner, Niven, Cordwainer Smith, Tolkien, Vance:
http://tinyurl.com/zqgkyzk
Okay, I fully expect to see this one get used.
(11) YO HO NO.: Round one million, seven hundred thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two of dueling analogies. Downloading an ebook is not like stealing a copy of a book from a bookstore, it is like photographing the pages of a book in a bookstore–the original copy of the book remains there for the store to sell. Comparing a digital copy of something to a physical copy is comparing tomatoes and suspension bridges.
Of course why reinvent the wheel about mocking the hyperbole in his claims when this video from 2006 does it perfectly.
@Heather Rose Jones
I basically agree, but I think I’m more skeptical than you about the ethics involved here. Most money from book sales goes to the publishers, distributors, and retailers, but we generally frame piracy as harm to the authors. That’s natural because we feel a connection to authors we like, but it’s also convenient for everyone else involved in the business.
@Bill
Pirated books begin with someone buying a copy to scan or strip DRM from, so I’m not sure this really works. If the argument against piracy is that you’re filling demand without compensating the author then selling a second-hand book is just small-scale piracy.
Meredith Moment:
Open Road has a massive sale on their Harlan Ellison e-titles. Virtually everything they have is $2.99 or less on Kindle at present.
As to second-hand (used) books, I bought quite a few decades ago. I have, in later years, bought books new-many of them replacing battered PBs I bought used. Now, I buy e-copies of things, many of those being copies of physical books I’ve bought.
Used books and libraries are a way of helping people starting out with little disposable income, allowing them to find authors they might miss otherwise. They aren’t the same as stealing. I discovered any number of authors whose work I went on to buy new after reading a library book or secondhand copy. Lisa Goldstein, Charles de Lint, Harlan Ellison and many others have made money from me that way.
Hell, I’ve videotaped movies off TV which I’ve since bought new on commercial VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray.
@Ghostbird:
No it is not piracy to sell second hand books, since the possibility of books being resold secondhand is part of the rules under which they are sold firsthand. It is part of the deal, while piracy is not. It is more like stealing a book, copying it, and then returning it.
@Ghostbird Pirated books begin with someone buying a copy to scan or strip DRM from, so I’m not sure this really works.
But it ends with digital copies in circulation that are in addition to the original paid-for copy, and it’s these digital copies that make up the piracy. They are new copies for which author (and editor/publisher/etc.) do not get paid.
If the argument against piracy is that you’re filling demand without compensating the author then selling a second-hand book is just small-scale piracy.
But that’s not the argument against piracy (or, at least, I’ve never seen it seriously advanced).
Copyright is, at its core, the right to control the generation of new copies of your work. It is not, and never has been, about how legitimate copies get used once they are made (and for which the creators have been paid).
@Bill: My Very Educated Mother Just Scrolled Us Nothing.
10) I’m surprised we haven’t summoned him to the comment section yet. I used to be on a form that would call him “Wool Sweaterly” in order to avoid his relentless vanity googling and showing up to sealion (even after banning). Though he eventually seemed to put that on google alert as well, and we had to switch to W*ll Sh*tt*rly.
11) I totally admit to stripping DRM in order to share books with friends, the same way as I would lend them out (and this way I don’t have to worry about never seeing them again!). I buy a lot of e-books, and not being about to share them with say my wife is a big downside to e-books otherwise.
I grew up with used book stores, libraries and elaborate networks of fannish friends who would allow reciprocal borrowing. These days it’s all e-books that I’ve paid for (books are one of the few subcategories where I allow myself to pretend I’m rich), and the quality has suffered because I have to do my own gatekeeping. I fondly remember selecting library books on the basis of which books looked more battered, dog-eared and generally abused. I’ve never been into pirating books but note that people are already pirating mine — hopefully they’ll spend some time on PR and build up the brand a little.
I just did some Hugo nominations and blogged about them. I’m never as comfortable with nominating as I am with voting, and this year I’m letting myself nominate “started-but-not-yet-finished” books — a category that describes most of my library. I won’t review a book I haven’t finished but I’m comfortable nominating them and trusting the author (especially if I’ve read that author before) not to make everything plummet into stupidity during the last hundred pages.
He’s probably being blocked, which is just as well.
@David W.
I’m pretty sure WS showed himself out last time, rather than being blocked.
@Muccamukk @Bill: My Very Educated Mother Just Scrolled Us Nothing.
That thing, where some misguided astronomers said Pluto is not a planet?
They were wrong. Pluto remains a planet, despite what they said. Always has been, always will be. Any right-thinking person would agree. Anyone who says otherwise is suspect.
(15) I was lucky enough to run into Paul on a number of times as we would spend hours in my friend’s local used bookstore. A true SF fan and reader. A few visits in, I asked him if I could run home to get my wife’s copy of Sideways for him to sign. He graciously obliged. The owner of the bookshop was a collector of baseball books. He was more that delighted when Paul would visit since Paul’s father was once the commissioner of baseball. Even with the bookshop having moved online only, Paul still orders books from them.
As a retired public librarian, I can’t speak highly enough of getting books from Interlibrary Loan. There is a website called WorldCat where you can see what books libraries own, (it’s not actually the world, it’s mostly American with some libraries with a few more from Canada, New Zealand, England and a few others.) I am always amazed at the items I have received. I wanted to read the reprint of Bradbury’s Dark Carnival. I actually received a beat-up dust coverless copy of the original Arkham House edition! I’ve even gotten titles that were only in 1 or 2 American libraries. And just for the hell of it, I just did a keyword search for “Ace Double”. There were 22 hits for an Ace Double with John Brunner.
@Mark: I’ve seen the man flounce away from the same venue multiple times in the same month.
@Bill: My Very Educated Mother Calmly and Judiciously Scrolled Us Nine Pixel Elephants.
@Alan: I’ve also had a lot of luck just asking for my library to add books. It usually takes a while, but I get them eventually.
@Mark, well I guess I was wrong. Sorry about that.
Bill has been making the case I would want to have made if I’d made my way to this scroll earlier.
Publishers have to a great extent been bought up by entertainment companies, and entertainment companies bitterly resent the fact that we don’t live in a pay-per-view world.
If I buy a print book, or a DVD, I have the right to sell it second-hand if I want to. If I buy an ebook, I have the right to read it on any device I want, pace the abomination that is certain provisions of the DMCA.
What I don’t have the right to do is make a new copy and sell it or give it away, just as I don’t have the right to photocopy or scan the print book and give away or sell that. That is what violates the rightsholder’s copyright, i.e., the right to make copies or to determine who can.
They have the right to be paid for every copy. They don’t have the right to be paid for every reader.
Relevant somehow, probably: BC Writers Dismayed at Government Court Action to Return Fees. Lawsuit seeks return of money paid for schools copying books and illustrations for classroom use.
Muccamukk: well, he’s there now in the more relevant thread, and vehemently denying ever following a discussion after being asked to leave… to which I guess he doesn’t count reappearing where not wanted in a different thread, or being banned, or people feeling the need to use alternate names just to mention him in passing without having him jump on them.
ETA: Though I’m debating whether it’s unfair to respond right now as I strongly suspect he’s one of the moderayed commentors Mike warned wouldn’t be able to have their posts seen for a few hours. Better methinks to wait until he can answer…. if I bother at all
Stupid query of the day:
If I can’t go find publisher or studio or whatever, is it terrible to just list what I have?
Or will they just chuck it if it isn’t complete?
The thing about copyright though, is that it’s law, not ethics. It was introduced as a pragmatic solution to the problem of commercial pirating as enabled by industrial printing and paper-making. It works well enough as long as books are physical artifacts and we don’t have to talk about format-shifting but it’s hardly the final word on authors’ rights.
December 2016 a filer recommended me a japanese cartoon about a panda bear (IIRC) working at a restaurant but always getting the orders wrong. I lost the link. Can someone remember and post me the link again? Thank you!