Current mood:	OMGWTF
Entry tags:	fandom failures, fandom: star wars, fanfic, self-publishing

Whoa. I didn't know anyone had balls like this!
EDIT: I didn't realize there was another wank about this topic until after I'd hit the submit button and this went into the fandom_wank queue. By then I couldn't delete it because it was in the approval queue. Sorry everyone!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933456027/qid=1123612981/sr=2-/103-6073320-0586259

Someone decided she didn't like how George Lucas wrote the first Star Wars movie, so she decided to rewrite "Star Wars: A New Hope" (and according to the reviews, did so very poorly) and decided to sell it on Amazon!

The reviews are quite the panoply... ranging from "OMG PLAGIARIZM!!1!" to "HAY WTF?! COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!" to "Not only is this illegal, it's SHITTY!" I'm even more amused by the lack of grammar and spelling of the reviewers than I am at the thought of this bitch Lori Jareo getting her ass handed to her by Lucas's attorneys (hey, maybe she's got herself one of them intarweb lawyers!)

I want to know why Amazon is allowing this in the first place! I mean, one bloody glance at the entry page on Amazon was all I needed to know exactly what this is -- without even reading a single actual paragraph of the "book"!

This isn't just plagiarism -- it's bloody copyright infringement on arguably the largest fiction franchise out there! (Star Wars ranks right up there with Lord of the Rings, but I don't know if it's bigger than LOTR, just cuz LOTR has some twenty or thirty years on Star Wars).

Well, methinks George Lucas is gonna hafta SMACK A BITCH soon. Holy shit.... exploding splooge!

*sits back to watch the wank unfold*

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narcissam
2006-04-24 02:18 am UTC (link)

Zines have been around for decades, and they're indeed done out of the goodness of people's hearts, or rather their love for things fannish. They're dying out because of the internet, but some of the zines are quite respected for their track record in not making money out of it.

A lot of published authors today got their starts in zines. Lois McMaster Bujold, for example, published and wrote in a Star Trek zine and now she's a best selling author. So sci-fi and fantasy authors are often quite tolerant of the zines.

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(Anonymous)
2006-04-24 03:19 am UTC (link)

But I still don't understand...isn't that page listing a bunch of bound stories for sale for significant amounts of money? Like even more than an HP book would cost? How is that different from someone selling a Star Wars novel for money? One of the stories on that page even bills itself "true to JKR as a fan story can get." I've definitely heard of zines, but I'm not seeing where the line is drawn here. It seems like buying a book online.

-C.K.

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	musouka 2006-04-24 03:24 am UTC (link)
	Yeah, but zines contains short stories, usually by more than one author, and only cost as much as it took to print them. As others have said, 60$ is a little outrageous... (Reply to this)(Parent)

	estrella 2006-04-24 10:22 am UTC (link)
	Right, but 60 dollars?? WTF?? Either Barb or the publisher is getting profit there. If it is the second, still Barb is letting this profit to happen. As I said above, the person selling the Star Wars fic, with a price of 20 dollars would be more convincingly covering the costs of publication, but 60 dollars is too much money for a 300 pages ezine, sorry. (Reply to this)(Parent)

(Anonymous)
2006-04-24 10:56 am UTC (link)

Oh, I understand the concept of a fanzine, but I thought that, with today's worldwide access to the Internet, it had become kind of a thing of the past. It just seems as if the line between legal and illegal is getting awfully thin.

I just can't fathom why a person would pay upwards of $50 EACH for someone's fanfic when they can read it online for free, or download it onto their own computer and print it.

~webbapettigrew

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	(Anonymous) 2006-04-24 05:05 pm UTC (link)
	I just can't fathom why a person would pay upwards of $50 EACH for someone's fanfic when they can read it online for free, or download it onto their own computer and print it. I can't either...people are funny in their fannishness sometimes. However, the cost to print that many pages from one's own printer is not as small as you might guess. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	esclaramonde 2006-04-24 11:59 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, and then there's the matter of what to do with the pages. I suppose you could punch holes in them (awfully time consuming) and put them in a binder, but then you can't take it anywhere to read it without looking really weird. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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