Monday News: Did Sony pirate books on hacking; some history on the Hugos; comics and “casual” fans; and a bigger market for manga

JanetPublishing NewsComics / copyright / fandoms / Hacking / Hugos / infringement / intellectual property / Manga / privacy / SFF / social media / Sony / Tumblr1 Comments

Sony pirated ebooks on hacking – Several site, including Boing Boing, are reporting that copies of two O’Reilly books available in PDF form on Sony’s internal servers, and part of The Hack, are pirated (which is ironic, since they’re books on hacking). The books are availably via Wikileaks, and recently Nate Hoffelder compared one of the Sony copies with a copy he purchased himself. His own comparison leaves him unconvinced the Sony copies infringed (O’Reilly is a DRM-free publisher). 

For the sake of thoroughness, I went to the O’Reilly website and tried to buy Inside Cyber Warfare and Hacking the Next Generation. I bought Hacking, but passed on Carr’s Inside Cyber Warfare because Sony’s copy was the first edition, and I could only buy the second edition.

After an hour of eyeballing the two versions of Hacking, I can’t find any evidence that would show that Sony’s copy was any less legal than my copy. Sony’s copy was slightly larger (7MB vs 6.47MB) and had not been modified since it was produced in 2009. My copy had been modified in 2013. –Boing Boing & Ink, Bits, & Pixels

Science Fiction’s White Boys’ Club Strikes Back – If you’ve been reading about the Hugo mess but don’t really know the background and the context, this New Republic piece provides some pretty good background, both on the history of SFF fandom, the Hugos, and the overwhelmingly white, male history of the genre and its celebration in the form of literary awards. Along these same lines, this post from Eric Flint has some valuable commentary on some of the issues inherent in literary awards in general, and the Hugos in particular.

Ever since science fiction coalesced as a distinctive fan community in the late 1920s (as a result of the efforts of editor Hugo Gernsback), it has been a white boys’ club. The virtual absence of non-white writing in the field was paralleled by the near invisibility of women writers. For many decades, the most successful female writers had to cloak their identity with initials, ambiguous names, or pseudonyms (C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, James Tiptree, Jr.). Even the women writers who didn’t disguise themselves as men adopted a male point of view in order to get their fiction published. “Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that,” Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a Paris Review interview. “The women who questioned those rules were too revolutionary for me even to know about them. So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world.”

The history of the Hugo Award, created in 1953 and named after Gernsback, is telling. In 1968, Anne McCaffrey became the first woman to win a Hugo for fiction. Between 1959 and 2014, the fiction nominations went to women 22 percent of the time (this statistic is complicated by the fact that one of these female nominees, James Tiptree Jr., was during some of this period widely assumed to be a man). In recent years, the percentage of female fiction nominees has shot up, reaching roughly parity levels between 2011 and 2013. –New Republic

Tumblr Fandom Doesn’t Owe You Sales: The Fans Who Are Ruining Everything (This Week) 2 – While I was chasing down more Hugo links, Sunita pointed the way to Natalie Luhrs’s blog, because she has a good collection of links, and that’s where I found this post, which, if nothing else, demonstrates how ubiquitous the “problem” is of what fans do and do not owe to creators. Apparently there is a perception in web comics that Tumblr fans are not “real” fans; that they are not paying (and therefore “serious”) customers, and that they don’t know what things were like in the olden days when digital texts were not so easily available (insert shaking fist here). And although the piece doesn’t focus on it, there is also some really interesting commentary on how venues like Tumblr represent a sort of breaking down of traditional textual form, which, depending on your perspective, can generate more creativity or lead to intellectual property violations:

There is a problem of attribution on Tumblr: art lifted, reblogged bereft of credit, edited, mis-credited and plagiarized. There is an even wider problem of broken telephone: facts repeated, mis-repeated, straight up falsified, and not sourced. It’s impossible to control the dissemination of information on platforms like Tumblr (like the internet). And sometimes, in the case of speaking truth to power, that’s a good thing. Other times, in the case of bullying, hoaxes, or IP theft, it’s frustrating in the extreme.

There is not, however, a Tumblr-specific problem of fake fans who can’t be converted from casual appreciators into enthusiastic consumers. Artists are owed credit for their work and payment where it is requested or required, but they are not owed customers or engagement in their preferred mode. Let’s unpack. –Women Write About Comics

Manga Publishers Try Games, Erotica to Grow Market – The post on Tumblr and comics fans reminded me of this article from Publishers Weekly on how manga publishers are looking to make their content more accessible, and therefore more popular, to Canadian and U.S. readers, including erotica, games, and even accessories and clothing. I have to wonder how core manga fans feel about this shift – do they view it as a watering down of manga or do they welcome a potentially broader and more diversified market?

In an effort to expand the North American manga market, publishers are adding a variety of new products to their lists, among them tie-ins to popular franchises, light novels (prose works based on manga and anime series), manga-themed tabletop games and even explicit, sex-positive manga series.

In 2014, Yen Press, Hachette’s manga and graphic novel imprint, launched Yen On, a dedicated imprint for light novels. Kurt Hassler, publishing director of Yen Press, was so pleased with early returns, “we quickly made a decision to double our release plans for 2015.” Said Hassler: “We have six light novels slated for publication in April, half of those being new series.” This includes Log Horizon, The Devil is a Part-Timer!, and No Game No Life. –Publishers Weekly

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

→ Janet