Program scripts from week of February 17, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Anne of Green Gables
A couple of stories this week having to do with publishing in this new digital world. Both show the power of the consumer to influence the market. The first has to do with the perils of the modern publisher.
You may have heard of the uproar over a new volume of the stories of Anne of Green Gables. Last fall a new ebook edition hit the shelves at Amazon. It brought together all three of the books by L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island) in a single volume. Sounds great right? Well fans of the books aren’t happy at all. Turns out there were a couple of problems. One small and one large.
The first thing you need to know is that Montgomery’s classic girls novels have lost copyright protection and are now in the public domain. This means that you and I could, if we so desired, publish our own versions of the books. And that’s just what happened. Using Amazon’s self publishing program someone had created their own edition. The problem was they don’t seem to have done their research.
The small problem was that the publisher listed the author by her full name - Lucy Maud Montgomery. She never did that herself because she didn’t much like her full name. So properly it should have been L.M. Montgomery. A silly mistake that should have been caught.
But the most serious error is the cover. Which shows Anne as an attractive, rather nicely shaped blonde. Anne, as described in the books, is a skinny twelve year old with bright red hair. The young lady on the cover of this version is decidedly, um, more Harlequin Romance. This is actually something of a trend with classic women’s novels. Several Jane Austen novels have suffered the same awful artwork. Now upsetting the core audience for the product was always bad choice. At last count there were no less than 395 one star reviews out of a total of just over five hundred reviews. And all that outrage has worked. The original cover is gone and a very safe cover has taken its place.
In the end the idea behind such a trend is just insulting to female readers and the great books they love. You’ll either tick off the existing fans or upset new readers when they’re looking for a bodice ripper and instead get great literature.
Space Marines
Here’s one of a couple of stories about the challenges of the modern publishing world. Beyond the Anne of Green Gables Blonde-gate we also have a case of corporate bullying.
Late last year independent sci-fi author and artist MCA Hogarth received word from Amazon that her book “Spots the Space Marine” was being removed from their shelves due to a claim of trademark infringement. Seems that UK games company Games Workshop had claimed a trademark on the term “space marines”. Now if you’re a long time sci-fi fan your head probably just exploded. That term has been around since at least 1932 when it appeared in the great science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories” in a short story called “Captain Brink and the Space Marines”. Since then it has been used by a great many of the legends of the science fiction genre. But Games Workshop was claiming that their game based trademark extended beyond it’s use in games and into all print material as well. Given the long usage prior to the creation of the game company itself it seems pretty silly that any such broad based trademark should have been issued.
But the real problem was that the company had lawyers and Hogarth didn’t. What was going on is called trademark bullying. It’s a tactic used by companies large and small. And it’s fairly reprehensible in the view of a great many people. Threaten an individual or small company with back breaking litigation to coerce them into giving up legal rights they may possess. Once word got many authors and organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, requested that Amazon review the complaint. They did and promptly reinstated the book.
Of course while that allows Hogarth to sell her book it doesn’t resolve the whole question of the use of the term “space marines”. My bet is that we’re going to see more of these kinds of stories popping up. It’s silly and a truly bad business concept but that never seems to stop anyone. In the end our best defense is to use the tools of the Internet to push back hard against this kind of intellectual bully boyism. When the time comes, fight back. Defend what’s right.
It’s what the space marines would do.
RIP Pepper Paire-Davis
I love movies for a wide variety of reasons. I love them because they make me laugh and make me cry. I love them because they help me escape from my day to day routine and they can help me appreciate that day to day routine. I love movies that are all about the story but I love the ones that are all about the characters too. One of the other things I love about movies is that they can help me discover things I never knew existed. Like Women’s Professional Baseball.
I’ve been a baseball fan since I was about 10 years old. That’s longer ago than I care to admit right now. I love the history of the game. I knew about the greats like Ruth and Foxx and Honus Wagner and the Waner boys, Big and Little Poison. But it took a movie to introduce me to the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Admit it, you probably had never heard of it before the movie “A League of Their Own” either. The league only existed for 11 years, a product of so many of baseball’s male stars going to fight in World War II.
What brings it to mind recently was the passing of one of that league’s stars Lavonne “Pepper” Paire-Davis. She was the inspiration for Geena Davis’s character in the movie. Paire-Davis was a catcher and a shortstop who racked up 5 league championships in the years she played the game. Her statistics show her to be a smart hitter who must have been a gap hitter. In over three thousand at bats she had more than 700 hits and 400 RBIs. All this with a grand total of just two Home Runs!
She had loved the game from early in life. Paire-Davis grew playing ball with her brothers in California then played softball three nights a week as a teen. Following High School she went to UCLA to study English, then when the war began she took a job as a welder. But when she heard the call for female ball players she was ready to go bouncing from Minneapolis to Racine, Fort Wayne and Grand Rapids. When the Baseball Hall of Fame recognized the league with a permanent display in 1988 Pepper Paire-Davis was included in it.
Oh and one last tie to that movie as well. Do you remember the league song that the girls sang? Well that was the real thing. And Paire-Davis co-wrote it.
Lavonne “Pepper” Paire-Davis was 88 years old.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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