A blog-wide request: Please do not create "book records" of my blog-to-book downloads on library sites such as GoodReads. Someone has done this with my Lion-Witch-Wardrobe compilation, and I apparently have to contact GoodReads support and beg them to take down the listing and it's all very inconvenient and unpleasant. So I has a sad this Sunday because of all this.
My blog-to-book deconstructions are unpublished for a reason (and it's not because I'm lazy or can't afford the ISBN numbers). There's a lot of quoted material on my blog, and I feel there's a major difference between posting that material in a blog form (or as a download-of-the-site for people with spotty internet connection) versus publishing the whole kit-and-kaboodle as an honest-to-goodness "book".
In the meantime if there are any GoodReads Super-Librarians in the audience who could do me the honor of deleting the record, I would greatly appreciate it as it beats my scattershot method of randomly contacting total strangers who have "Super Librarian" under their name while waiting for GoodReads to write me back. *sigh*
Update: In my experience, these things usually devolve into huge and emotional derails about Fair Use across various countries, the legality of fan-fiction, and/or the fact that just about anybody can bring suit for just about anything in the U.S.A. Because I do not wish to re-justify my request further in the comments, I have closed this post for discussion.
If the GoodReads people get back to me that merely having the compilation available for download constitutes "publishing", then I will most likely feel moved to remove the download links from the blog entirely. If that happens, I will note that in this post as a comment.
2 comments:
Wait, does GoodReads only work for published book cataloguing (audio, physical, or electronic)? I use LibraryThing and catalogue everything that goes onto my ereader - whether it's blog compilations, long-form journalism, books, fanfiction, or whatever. It's not expected that things catalogued on LT are books, though it isn't optimized for non-book works.
Because I don't really see a problem with that GR entry through the lens of LT. It doesn't say that it's been published or anything, or that it's pretending to be anything that it isn't (because you can't know) - though "blog compilation" might be useful to have somewhere to make it more clear.
Thank you to the kind and anonymous Super-Librarian who fixed this for me. The GoodReads staff got back to me and were pleased to see that it had already been deleted and saved them the trouble. Much thanks!! :)
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