Speakeasy

Need something new to read but not really sure what to start on next? Visit reading trails. It is also a social networking site, so you can create trails of your own and share them with others. Pick a trail that interests you and you can either follow a certain trail or head off on a different one when one trail intersects with another one.
Fans of Jane Austen are taking their fandom a bit far. People have started to leave the ashes of loved ones in the gardens surrounding the Jane Austen House Museum and it’s making people a little upset. The collections manager Louise West says ‘is is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash particularly so for our gardener. On three or four occasions, our gardener Celia Simpson has found piles of human ash placed in the garden secretly’. That’s taking fandom a step too far isn’t it? And surely in a polite Regency society no-one would be so vulgar as to leave ashes in the garden?

Does anyone still send fan mail to their favourite author using good ol’ snail mail? Has anyone ever gotten a reply? These days it’s so easy to post a message on to an author’s blog or website. You are practically guaranteed a reply by any author  who checks their website semi-regularly. But spare a thought for the diligent authors who wanted to respond to every letter they received when posting a letter was the only way to go. Answering them all would take up all their time - time better spent writing their next great work. Robert Heinlein, an American novelist and science fiction writer, came up with solution to that - the form letter. But not just any form letter. This form letter can reply to any possible letter he may have received.

Just came across this post on Making Light (it’s almost two years old, sorry) that has a really interesting point to make about about fanfic and how it relates to ‘legitimate’ fiction. The discussion that follows in the comments is fascinating, ranging from issues of copyright and trademark, aesthetic and moral problems with fanfic, and numerous attempts to define exactly what counts as fanfic, anyway.

For those not in the know, fanfic, or fanfiction, is fiction written by fans (duh) of an original work, like a book or TV show, that uses the same setting and/or characters (there’s a better description in this article). It has a huge presence on the internet, and has sparked quite a bit of debate on whether it enhances or denigrates the original work. It’s all very unauthorised, and occupies a fairly dodgy legal area; most works are published online, and not written for money. The general consensus seems to be that as long as fanfic writers don’t make any money from their work, copyright holders are happy to ignore it.

A lot of what I’ve always found most interesting about fanfic is in the Making Light discussion; legal and ethical ramifications aside, fanfic colletively asks ‘but what would happen if…’, and that seems to me just another way of exploring a narrative. If you’ve ever seen a film and re-written the ending in your head (let’s face it, who hasn’t?), that’s like fanfic. Maybe you don’t write down your alternate ending and stick it up on your blog, but some people do. Some people engage with a work so much that they want to explore what the characters would do if placed in a situation outside the creator’s narrative, or if interacting with characters from another novel or show (called a crossover). Yes, there’s terribly-written fanfic out there, but there are terribly-written books out there, too. While intellectual property and copyright are extremely important issues, and authors have every right to defend their ownership, if your fans want to engage with your work that much, doing something that doesn’t exactly affect you that much, that’s pretty harmless, right?

Authors’ reactions vary: JK Rowling is flattered, though she asks that the more explicit stories be kept away from young fans, and Joss Whedon is all for it (Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are two of the biggest fanfic-generating creations around). Anne Rice is against; fantasy writer Robin Hobb wrote an anti-fandom piece, found here with fan rebuttal; Anne McCaffrey sent a cease and desist notice to a fansite. Some of the negative reactions are quite old now; I think most authors are happier to turn a blind eye.

Wikipedia has some more info, and a few links if you’re interested. Laura Hale’s famous (and infamous) history of fanfic can be found here.

Returning to the questions raised by the JK Rowling lawsuit thing, another argument that I may have overlooked seems to be whether free material, in the form of free chapters and extracts, e-book downloads, fan paraphernalia, or anything else you find on the internet, impinges on the official sales of an author’s text, or boosts them.

One of the concerns Rowling apparently had about Van Ander’s unofficial encyclopaedia was that it would cannibalise the sales of the official encyclopaedia she intended to release (she was going to donate proceeds to charity). But will it? Or will fans go on to buy her official edition anyway? How popular could an unauthorised lexicon ever have been, especially in competition with her official version? (Link)

It’s almost as if the book industry is finally getting in on the piracy debate. Now that e-books and online texts are more and more available, will we have to deal with pirated books? And are they a bad thing, anyway? This article, which is actually about the circulation of early episodes of Battlestar Galactica, says that a ‘try-before-you-buy’ approach can really work. A lot of publishers have already embraced this, in the form of free sample chapters, and in Neil Gaiman’s case, free e-books. A recent post on Booksquare also asks a few pertinant questions.

Neil maintains an excellent blog, by the way, with a whole thread on copyright issues as he encounters them. And he has several interesting posts on the Rowling case, including one from a lawyer who outlines a few interesting copyright points (apparently, the ‘Fair Use’ clause RDR is attempting to apply to Van Ander’s lexicon only applies to ‘transformative’ works, where the contested product is significantly different to the original).

It may have come to your attention that JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, etc, has gotten into some kind of legal stew with a fan. I’ve only been following it peripherally, myself, and I’ve been unable to decide who’s side to come down on, partly because, from the reportage, I haven’t been able to work out exactly what’s going on.

Now, though, I’ve had a bit of a look at the whole thing. The situation as it stands seems to be that a fan, Steven Van Anders, who’s been running an online Harry Potter resource, has hooked up with a publisher called RDR and published a hardcopy lexicon trading on the success of the website. And Rowling and Warner Brothers have taken them to court.

From what I can tell, the major issues in the case are copyright related. Rowling and WB’s lawyers have claimed Van Anders’ book copies Rowling’s work directly, to a degree of up to 90%. In return, RDR’s lawyers are trying for a Fair Usage claim, which allows limited use of copyright material without permission from the copyright holders.

The major issue according to fans and interested members of the public, however, is the question of whether Rowling, as one of the richest women in Britain and clearly in the position of power when it comes to publishing rights, has done herself any favours by suing a small press, and by extension, one of her own fans. On the one hand, she’s well within her rights to litigate against someone who infringes on her copyright. On the other, she comes off looking a wee bit controlling, maybe even tight-fisted.

But the whole situation has generated quite a bit of ill-will and anxiety, with fans wondering whether this lawsuit will open the floodgates for paranoid authors to sue online fansites or fanfiction authors, and what kind of future fandoms will have. There’s a strong argument that the proliferation of fan material, which by definition is often in breach of copyright, can only enhance and strengthen an author’s fanbase, thus boosting the economic value of the work. Rowling is famous for (and because of) her rabid fans, and, let’s face it, she’s been ignoring or even endorsing the massive network of fans, fanfiction, web resources and online artworks that obsessively catalogue and reinvent what is essentially her intellectual property. Perhaps that’s why there’s been a mini-backlash now that she’s finally put her foot down.

It’s hard to know what Van Anders’ intent was (malicious moneymaker, or just a dope?), but what happens in the apparently unlikely event that RDR wins? Will authors who don’t make as much money as Rowling, and who don’t have the weight of the Warner Brothers conglomerate behind them, have to take steps to protect against copyright infringement? Will this then arbitrarily prevent fans from harmlessly copying and reinventing material, thus stunting the author’s potential fanbase?

Booksquare has weighed in on the debate, discussing the merits of suing your readers, and the kind of ill-will and future suppression of fandoms that could potentially come out of it. In the comments on the post, debate continues, with some very interesting points for and against, by readers who have been following the case much closer than me.

We came across this interesting post earlier this week - it’s a look at the various bookish social-networking sites that are out there, along with recommendations of the best.

We like the look of Shelfari and LibraryThing (which is apparently the most established of the lot, and has a handy online tour for those of you not sure how an online book network works…)

UPDATE - Check the comment below before signing up to Shelfari - thanks for the tip off Genevieve!