Filed under: Ebooks, Letters of Opinion, Misc
There was that story running around the interwebs a while back that some guy had mashed up a bunch of Jane Austen stories and submitted them to publishing houses and agents to see if Jane Austen could still get published today. The big story was that the publishing folks were rejecting it because Jane Austen is just not saleable in today’s market. (I’d give links but I’m on dialup and it is just too painful to do the internet crawl on dialup).
Other folks suggested that maybe these editors and agents were rejecting it because they recognized that it was plagiarism or, at least, too close to the original.
Perhaps that is what Dreamspinner Press should have done with Lucia Logan’s book, A Hidden Passion. Of course, not they nor did any of the Eppie judges notice that A Hidden Passion was so close in form and language to Jane Eyre. The post which reveals the startling similarities is at Speak Its Name and is dated September 25, 2007.

On October 5, 2007, Erastes published an email from Dreamspinner Press that the book had been withdrawn from the catalog with the author’s …



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