Reminds me of the DVD rental place I saw that made sure to plaster "Be Kind Rewind" stickers all over the movie and playstation rental discs.
Suomi Summer
6 hours ago
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Book with a stripped cover
I saw this tonight in a legally-downloaded electronic book file.
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12 comments:
That is fascinating.
Obviously, whatever algorithm converts the text to electronic form cant tell that that page is superfluous.
I remember the first time I ever noticed that was in Steven King's Different Seasons-the book that contains the Shawshank story.
When I worked in a market that sold books... the distributor would come in, rip the covers off and leave piles of these "stolen" books for us to dump. If they were that concerned shouldn't they have made sure they were destroyed themselves?
It's also not like you can't go to the library and check one out and read it... along with a hundred other people for 1 purchased copy... all reading it on the same dime so to speak. Weird.
Rewind a playstation disc huh? Ok...
I've seen a few of these on books through the years because my fascination with romance novels. Never on a legally downloaded electronic book file though.
Mr Manuel...it took me a minute to figure out what you were saying! I'm not usually so dense! LOL
The big companies would rather just tear off the cover of the unsold books and have those shipped back to them (for accounting purposes) than to pay for the whole book to be shipped back if they don't expect to be able to sell the book somewhere else. The books themselves are supposed to be destroyed, though a lot of them are donated to jails. But bookstore employees take home a few, and dumpster divers get a few, and a lot of them end up for sale at flea markets.
I remember watching one of those court tv shows, and this guy had self published his own book and went around trying to get bookstores to sell them. So he sold a few books that way, but after a while the bookstore owners wanted the shelf space for something else. So he went and picked up some of the books, and others were supposed to be shipped back to him. And the one bookstore owner was so used to just ripping off the covers and sending back the covers, that's what he did. So the author took the guy to court for destroying his books. And the bookstore owner's excuse was that this is just the way it is done. And that is the way it is usually done with a big publisher, but that is at the publishers request to save on postage. No one pays to publish their own book and then wants the books destroyed. Dumb.
My first copies of "Lord of the Rings" as a kid were cover-stripped copies. I remember making replacement covers for them.
I don't feel that Tolkien or the publisher ended up ripped off by me: I now own several legit editions of LOTR, with covers.
Laughing: Yeah. The cover ripping thing is typically done only with "mass market" paperbacks. These are the common-sized ones, like most of the Trek novels. It's not done with hardcovers or "trade paperbacks" (the larger ones, like those hardcover-sized Harry Potter paperbacks).
However, bookstores and distributors do something similar with some magazines and newspapers. Instead of stripping off the covers, the bookstores or magazine stands strip off the title area of the front page or cover, send it back to the distributor, and discard the rest.
The People's Court or whatever should have really nailed the bookstore owner for ripping off covers he was not supposed to. Typically, the cover-ripping thing is explicitly spelled out in a publisher/distributor's merchandise return terms. You never just "assume".
I guess it's like saying "Oops, I dialed the wrong number."
I'd forgotten all about rewinding rental tapes.
Nothing wrong with reading a free copy of a stripped book. The only issue is whether the retailer gets a publisher's credit and then turns around and sells the book.
Now the interesting part. Do you have a Kindle? If so, do you like it?
Again, LOL!
That's pretty interesting. I had no idea.
Gerry: I love it. I have a Kindle 1 and the first generation Sony e-reader. There are some rough edges on the Kindle 1, that I understand have been improved in the Kindle 2.
No doubt that whatever e-reader is around 3 or so years from now will be so much better than what we have now.
There's a story about retailers tearing off and returning book covers in the memoir called THE TENDER BAR, by J. R. Moehringer. Good book, too, that.
I received the Kindle 2 as a b-day present last month and I love it. In fact, the next book I download will probably be Lee Child's Without Fail. The Reacher novels are some of my favorites.
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