Some say that they can read other people ‘like a book’. But you can also read other people by their books. I always find a bookshelf analysis a useful way of getting acquainted with someone without having to ask too many questions. A shelf full of Noam Chomsky tomes? I’d better avoid discussing politics. Books on spirituality or lives of religious figures? Nobody could read more than one or two of them without being a believer, so skip religion. Too many books with the author’s name in large, gold-embossed letters? Better keep the conversation on mass culture topics. I noted but tactfully said nothing when I found a copy of Fat Is a Feminist Issue on the shelves of a female colleague who was not quite as slim as she once was.

Though helpful, the bookshelf examination is not a perfect analytical tool. A 2005 survey found that one in three residents of London and south-east England had bought a book ‘solely to look intelligent’. So if I was using books as a proxy for human characteristics I could wrongly come to the conclusion that a person was intelligent, because he or she had a book that an intelligent person would buy. And now another British survey finds that:

Fifty-five per cent of those polled for the survey said they buy books for decoration, and have no intention of actually reading them.

Continue reading “Reading people by their books” →

One curious feature of both academia and journalism is that copying without attribution something written by somebody else that is correct is a far worse sin than publishing something that is one’s own work but entirely wrong. Yet from the point-of-view of the reader, which is the larger problem? Many of us rely heavily on the reporting and research of others in forming our views, and an erroneous fact has much more serious consequences for the soundness of our opinions than a mistaken attribution.

These strong norms against plagiarism, as Richard Posner argues in his The Little Book of Plagiarism, are a modern phenomenon, with great writers like Shakespeare freely copying from others, though often improving on the original in the process. In his time, there were pragmatic reasons for plagiarism. When plays were censored it was safer to re-use old material than to create new words that might be censored. Also, without modern mass production of cultural works copying brought ideas to wider audiences.

Posner sees the rise of individualism as important: ‘each of us thinks that our own contribution to society is unique, and so deserves public recognition, which plagiarism clouds.’ This has potential economic consequences, as authors (as I noted earlier in the week) become brands. The original author may be disadvantaged in selling his or her work by those using their words and gaining sales instead; the plagiarist may create a false brand, which consumers cannot rely on when considering whether to buy their subsequent works.

But clearly it isn’t just about the money. There is outrage surrounding plagiarism even when it has no financial consequences. And it doesn’t really have much to do with protecting consumers, who may be only vaguely aware of the author’s identity when, for example, reading newspapers and magazines or watching a TV show. It has far more to do with the pride of authors in wanting to take credit for their work, and in our interest in character – if plagiarists deceive us about authorship, can we trust them at all? (though this matters less with fiction than non-fiction).
Continue reading “Why is plagiarism bad?” →

1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a seventeen year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township – journalists, Hudson Bay Company men, trappers, traders – but do they want to solve the crime, or exploit it? In this stunning debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and subtle humour to create a book that is at once an exhilarating thriller, a panoramic novel, a study of the human condition and a keen murder mystery.

Does that make you want to read The Tenderness of the Wolves? The problem with fiction, as I’ve noted before, is that if you want a good reading experience there is no strong reason to buy something by a ‘debut’ writer like Stef Penney. There are already more novels by authors with good reputations than most of us could read in a lifetime; and even better most of them can be bought cheaply in second-hand bookstores. So why take a risk on first-time novelist based just on the publisher’s hype (‘stunning’, ‘exhilarating’, ‘panoramic’)?

Penney’s publisher, Murdoch Books, is trying to get around this by adopting a sales pitch I don’t recall seeing for books before: a money-back guarantee (pdf). Superficially, this opens them to reader dishonesty – you could enjoy the book and still get your $29.95 back, because Murdoch isn’t going to bother proving that you did in fact like it. It’s not like a manufactured good for which there can be objective tests as to whether or not it functions properly.

But in reality it is probably a shrewd move, since a money-back guarantee is a strong signal by the publisher of confidence in its product, but in practice even people who don’t like the book aren’t likely to bother recovering their $29.95. To get it, you have to send the book to Sydney, which would cost a few dollars in postage and packaging, do it by the end of June, and wait up to 8 weeks for your cheque to arrive. How much hassle are people prepared to go through to get $29.95 in two months? For most us, not much.

The money-back guarantee won’t affect my fussiness with fiction – what’s valuable to me is not the $30 but my reading time – so I will stick with my usual method of relying on the opinions of reviewers I trust. But for the budget-constrained reader it is a sales pitch that might just help Stef Penney overcome those first-time novelist doubts.