It’s no secret that I’m trekking off to RWA in a week and a half. Although if my personal blog is the barometer, you might be wondering. That, however, is a post for another day. This year I’d planned to stay home. The theory being I’d go every other year. Uh, yeah, that was before I found out Linda Howard was going to be one of the keynote speakers. That put an end to that rationale in a hurry.

Last year was my first venture to the RWA conference. As a reader I had a slew of questions about going. Not the least of my concerns was whether or not readers should attend the RWA shindig and whether or not we (readers) would be, or are, welcome. In addition to that I had all the usual logistical practicalities that had to be addressed as well.

Like any red-blooded romance reader, I girded my loins and did some research. There were almost no limits to who, or where or when I’d ask my questions. Some stuff is easy and straight forward. Finding out where it is, cost, etc. like you’d do for any trip. However, the stuff I really wanted to know required a little more digging.

This is where web sites of writers, bloggers and publishers helped immensely. Who doesn’t get excited about a trip? Fortunately, most people are willing to share this information. In 2007 RWA was in Dallas. I was riveted to my desk chair each evening after work jumping from post to post reading about about the day’s events and looking at pictures. That experience is what convinced me to go to in 2008 to San Francisco. I started saving my money while everyone was still in Dallas.

Now that I’ve gone to the convention once myself, I’ve sort of condensed the experience down to what I call THE THREE ESSENTIAL E’S.

E number 1 - Expectations.

What are yours and are they realistic? As I mentioned previously there’s plenty out there to read about RWA. There are entire blogs that exist just to link to posts about RWA. So you can read and find out a lot. My biggest expectation was to meet favorite authors, of course. Consequently I was able to talk to, email and post about this and get enough feedback to allay my fears. There are times and places where this is possible, appropriate and even welcomed.

Maybe you are wondering what to expect from the writers themselves? In the professional setting of the conference they are wonderful for the most part. They are, after all, just people like everyone else. At the Literacy Signing where they are expecting the public the interaction is great. However, you might want to re-think your plans if your expectations include “hanging out” with a particular author. To be sure this happens, but they are usually well established relationships that were made prior to the conference.

Expectations are also important when deciding what you are going to do at the conference. Again, RWA is good about updating their site and letting you know who will be speaking, and what some of the forums are going to be. It’s worth gathering all this information, because even as a reader I found a couple of the forums informative and interesting.

It all goes back to the old saying, “You can only get out of something as much as you put into it.” My observation has been that the people who go to RWA with open arms and are ready to learn, play and embrace the experience have a wonderful time. Heck I can’t wait to go to see my blogger buddies. Being able to meet and see some of my favorite writers and maybe get a few signed books is just icing on the cake.

E number 3 - Energy.

You need all of this you can get. Don’t laugh, it’s true. It may have been an aberration of a newbie, but most people I met and spoke with all said the same thing. You go, go, go like the energizer bunny the whole time. I know I did. Sleep! Who needs it? You’re at RWA! You could miss something! It’s a whirlwind and can be so much fun spending time with other readers, friends, taking in the conference and the city you are visiting. I’m going to suggest you pace yourself, but the better advice is to tell you to be sure you take the day after you return off from work so you can recover.

So that’s it. I’m off to reorganize a closet all in an effort to figure out what I’m taking on the trip. You can never start these things too soon. I might need to shop and buy something before I leave. You never know.

Have you been to RWA? What was memorable for you? What advice would you give a reader who is attending. Do you have a question about RWA? Ask away.

I’m guessing that after the Cassie Edwards plagiarism scandal some feel they have heard enough about plagiarism. But I am going to ask that you read a short piece by Duke Humanities scholar Cathy Davidson on the Christopher Anderson (Wired, The Long Tail, FREE) scandal, anyway, especially her suggestion that “Anderson getting caught at pasting in unattributed and unchanged paragraphs from another source may be the least offensive version of “theft” in this too-free appropriation of ideas caught-out in FREE.” *

What does Davidson mean when she says, the least offensive version of “theft”? How can plagiarism itself not be primarily, uncompromisingly offensive?

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies scholar at UT Austin who is working on what looks to be one of the most interesting books on the Internet, The Googlization of Everything, explains further:

Anderson’s sins are particularly grave because they betray a laziness, not a malicious intent. It’s an offense to his readers and the craft of writing — not to the sources. I think that is widely misunderstood in the “gotcha” culture of plagiarism revelation. . . .

Nonfiction writing is a distinct form of expression that implies a contract with the reader. The reader must be able to challenge and certify the various claims the author makes. . . .

When a publisher strips notes from a book and a writer takes grave shortcuts in the composition process, they violate the trust of the readers.

That is the sin here. It is not a crime. But it is not a mere mistake. It’s the result of two systematic flaws in the composition and publishing process. And it leaves readers like me and my students betrayed.

The Virginia Quarterly blog post from which I extracted Vaidhyanathan’s comments is worth reading, too, not only for the passage comparisons between Anderson and Wikipedia, but also for the numerous links to discussions on the issue and a few “mean boy” comments aimed at those who refuse to let Anderson off the hook (no, it’s not just Romance, folks).

What I’m most interested in here, though, is this idea that the intellectual sin of laziness (which is inclusive of the editor and publisher who eliminated footnotes from Anderson’s book and insisted on a leaner approach to attribution), of failing to give the reader a way to adequately judge and measure Anderson’s assertions (both of fact and of inferences from fact) may be worse than the lifting itself.

In one sense I disagree; that is, I don’t think we need a hierarchy of sins here for Davidson and Vaidhyanathan’s points to have sufficient gravity. As anyone who has been plagiarized will tell you, there is a fundamental sense of violation that needs to be respected. And if we are going by the contract metaphor Vaidhyanathan constructs, why should that contract not first be conceptualized as between an author and his sources? Yes, it’s true that one cannot plagiarize an idea, and there is plenty of open space in which we can parse out the nuances of intertextuality and the idiopathic generation of the same idea from totally different minds. Also, there might be differences between nonfiction and fiction writing that are worth noting. For example, in fiction, there is often such a merging of expression and idea that separating them can be virtually impossible. But even if the plagiarized source is Wikipedia, which many see as an impersonal amalgamation of reliable and unreliable information, the lifting itself is not insignificant, especially if we are going to entertain the idea that intellectual laziness is the critical act of dishonesty.

At the same time, though, I see what Davidson and Vaidhyanathan are saying about laziness and all the ways in which our moral outrage over plagiarism obscures that element of plagiarism. We tend to focus so much on demonizing the perpetrator that we don’t often extend our consideration beyond the wrong of taking something that doesn’t belong to them and passing it off as theirs.

However, writing and reading both require communal context for relevance, and as such, they create, replicate, and reinforce community norms and knowledge. Clearly, the Internet has made it more difficult to discern who said what first, and there is a strong, valid argument to be made for a free flow of information as conducive to both progressive creativity and democracy, as well as the inflexible reality of phraseology too common to claim. Two Harvard researchers recently released their findings that “weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.” Whether or not you accept their conclusions, no one can argue with the fact that copyright was originally envisioned as a limited right, and its Constitutional grant expressly “[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Even in real property there is a bias against limiting conditions on the sale and transfer of land. And we can all see the effects of stultification in our economic markets.

So if reading and writing are both communal activities, then the farther we move away from believing that careful delineation of sources is necessary and significant, the more we disable the community’s ability to participate in the text and in the act of reading. The more we impair the potential of other writers to place a text within its proper philosophical, historical, and ideological context. We subtly encourage the dissociation between ideas and thinkers and therefore encourage intellectual laziness, making it much easier to inadvertently legitimate bogus facts and research. We reinforce the notion that people are not interested in or able to understand the complex interaction among texts by mistaking intertextuality for intellectual sloth. For intertextuality matters most when the community for whom the work is intended is educated, informed, and engaged in the production and assimilation of cultural and intellectual knowledge. Ethics and creativity are bound together, in other words, each pushing the other forward.

So in this sense, plagiarism is not merely or even perhaps primarily about one person passing off another person’s work as their own; it is also about making writers and readers complicit in the de-legitimation of sound research, honest attribution, and the hard work of innovative thinking and writing. It is about erasing the difference between the ephemeral but valid phenomenon of influence and the wholesale appropriation of other’s thoughts in place of one’s own thinking. It is about devaluing the rewards of difficult work and discouraging independent confirmation of facts asserted. It is about ignoring the relationship between intellectual rigor via scrupulous attribution and intellectual and creative progress. As Cathy Davidson points out, the media attention to Anderson’s book will likely result in higher sales, which demonstrates how insidiously efficient a culture of intellectual laziness can be without vigilant protection of certain standards of attribution.

I think that one of the things Davidson and Vaidhyanathan are uncomfortable with is the way these plagiarism accusations can so easily become feeding frenzies. This was a major bone of contention in the Cassie Edwards incident, and sadly, it made some blame the people who discovered the wrongdoing rather than the person who did the lifting. But notwithstanding the inclination people have to eagerly pile on or the enthusiastic backlash that may ensue, I think that if we want to protect intellectual honesty and responsibility in the way scholars like Davidson and Vaidhyanathan value it, we’re always going to be doing so somewhere between the “’gotcha’ culture of plagiarism revelation” as Vaidhyanathan calls it, and the jump in sales a book at the center of those revelations enjoys. And we’re going to have to do it not just because it’s bad to steal, but also because while the free flow of creativity energizes social progress (and vice versa), keeping good track of who said what, encourages all of us to be our best, ethically and creatively.

*Note: Cathy Davidson’s academic work on literature is extremely relevant to Romance scholarship. Her classic book, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the American Novel (Oxford, 1988), offers a rich history of the relationship between women and late 18th and 19th century popular fiction, focusing especially on the way women read fiction communally and measured their own values and potential choices against those presented in the books they read and discussed. The book was reissued in an expanded version in 2004, and it remains a critical work in the study of American literature, women’s history, and cultural studies.

A few days ago in Twitter I proposed a question about a book I just recently finished reading and got quite a lot of feedback from fellow romance readers.  The question was:  As a romance reader, how would you feel about a book marketed for romance readers and find out that there isn’t a HEA (happily ever after)?  Many people responded quite forcefully and adamantly that they would not be happy and some would be downright pissed off.  I believe one responder went so far as to use the word stabby (which isn’t in the dictionary, but is very descriptive, none-the-less).  I am sure many of you reading this are nodding your head right along with those other irate readers.  Luckily for me, I had read this particular author before and I also knew up front that the hero was a ghost, which foreshadowed a bittersweet ending right off the bat.  How can this book end well if the hero is already dead, right?

So this book (I am going to keep it anonymous for now) is published by Harlequin, which every romance reader knows, sells romance books!  This book can be found in the romance section at bookstores.  Is this book not being marketed to romance readers?  If so, then wouldn’t the expectation be that the protagonists receive their happily ever after?  I can honestly say that without being familiar with the author had I stumbled across this book while perusing the romance section of my local bookstore I would have been outraged - absolutely positively outraged - at the way this book ended.  I may even had demanded my money back or set fire to it.  That is how deeply set in stone my expectations are for romance.   As I found out on Twitter, many other romance readers feel the same way.

So how does a book without the requisite HEA find its way on the shelves in the romance section of the bookstore?  Who decides how to market a book and why, if there are rules governing what constitutes a romance, why aren’t they being used?  Next thing you know, I’ll find a Nicolas Sparks book next to a Nalini Singh and then where will I be?  Up shit creek – that’s where!

Chime in.  What is your take on this?

I love ebooks. The convenience of them. Their portability. My first ebook reader was an eBookwise: it’s pretty battered, but still beloved, rather like the Velveteen Rabbit. Earlier this year, I bought a Kindle. While I like the form of the eBookwise reader better (it fits my hand more comfortably and the adjustable shades of the font and background are much easier on my eyes), the whispernet that permits me to buy directly from Amazon made the Kindle more convenient. Kindle is limited, though, to Amazon offerings and whatever I’m willing to buy elsewhere and upload. Being lazy and also not the most technologically savvy person, I don’t like having to convert ebooks from one format to another in order to be able to read them. [A universally adopted format would be nice, please, publishers.] E-publishers who offer ebooks in html have an edge with me, because those files can be read on either of
my readers or my laptop. This means I’ve been buying more from small e-pubs rather than bigger publishing houses, which lock their books up in other formats, more secure formats theoretically.

While visiting a popular e-publisher (EP), I was reminded again of the pricing conundrum. What is the right price for an ebook? Amazon seems to think it is $9.99 for most books, and I tend to agree for the most part. But that $9.99 was set for the e-version of trade paperbacks and hardback print books. What is the proper price point for books that have no print version, or whose print versions will come later?

Checking out the word counts was a revelation for me, though, because in my head, a Harlequin Presents is the “shortest” book that usually satisfies me. If pressed, I would say that I’m not a novella fan. But it turns out that a significant number of the e-published books I’ve bought and enjoyed via Kindle and Fictionwise/eBookwise are novellas, and noticeably shorter than HPs.

These are the word counts at EP’s website:
Short stories (up to 15,000 words): $2.24
Novellas (15,000-30,000 words): $4
Short novels (30,000-45,000 words): $4.68
Novels (45,000-70,000 words): $5.35
Longer novels (70,000-100,000 words): $6.29
Very long novels (>100,000 words): $7.19

For the sake of comparison, I checked out the standard prices and word counts of a Big Name (NY) Publisher:
Spice Briefs/Nocturne Bites (5,000-15,000 words): $2.99
Harlequin Presents, American, SuperRomance (50,000-65,000 words): $4.75 - $4.99
Harlequin Historicals (70,000-75,000): $5.99
HQN, Mira, Spice and Luna (90,000-120,000 words): $7.99 mmp, $13.95 tpb

Observation #1: the EP has a better price on short stories than BNP.

Observation #2: as word count increases beyond novella length, the e-publisher’s books are more or less equivalent to the prices of the BNP. (There is a caveat, of course: BNP’s list price is seldom the price actually paid due to discounting, which makes the net price slightly cheaper. I don’t know if EP ever has sales or discounts its prices.] At the higher end, the e-published book length is equal to or even perhaps greater than the print published book. The relationship between word count and price is not linear by publisher, nor do the price changes compare across publisher.

Observation #3: The novella length seems key. The BNP does not have a line equivalent to it in length, but it appears to be by far the favored length for the e-publisher. The vast majority of the titles I checked out, across subgenres and authors, were novella length. Is this because the supply from BNP doesn’t match the demand, or has EP tapped into something? Is it the right length with the right price, neither too expensive nor too short?

At the lower end of the word count, is the epublisher making a great deal more money per word in comparison to the longer ebooks? This might explains the preponderance of books of that length.

When you buy books, electronic or paper, what is your tipping point, the price at which you will decide to borrow it from the library or buy a copy from the UBS? Does the size of the book, word count or some other measure make a difference to the price you are willing to pay?

I recognize and accept that books will eventually make a permanent transition from paper to various electronic formats. I accept that one day my grandkids or great grandkids, should I be blessed with them, will stare in wonder at my bookcases and ask me, “what are those grandma?” Kind of like the day I over heard the following conversation between two of my children while we were at my mother’s house. The kids were, maybe, eight and four. The four year old asks, “what are these black things, sis?” “These are giant cds. They have stuff on both sides. You have to have a special machine to play them. They sound awful. All scratchy and bumpy.” “So why did grandpa keep them if they’re all ruined?” “‘Cuz they remind him of the old days he says.”

Many readers are already making the transition to digital, particularly for short series titles. Lots of readers are transitioning over to iphone to make use of the app that allows you to read on the phone. My library has titles available as a three week download for several platforms. They even have little portable players with a book on it that patrons can borrow. While I’m glad these new technologies potentially allow me hoard, er..treasure lots of more titles in a significantly smaller space, part of me mourns the potential loss of actual books.

There are many good reasons for transitioning off of paper, most of them having to do with dwindling natural resources, increasing energy costs, lack of enough shelf space to hold them all and the like. Likely there are just as many, if not more, reasons to value the eventual transition to digital: greater variety of genres and formats and publishers, better price points, wider availability, etc. So other than price, what’s stopping me from changing over?

Speaking as a somewhat of a traditionalist, though, digital just isn’t the same. Digital books just don’t have the same cachet. I can’t clutch my cell phone to my chest at the end of a fabulous romance and sigh with happiness. Well, ok, I can, but it isn’t the same. Really. It isn’t. Also? I want to be able to move my books from place to place as I please without worrying about potentially breaking the law. *Whine, whine, whine*

For me most important issue is DRM (digital rights management). I want to be able to move my books from gadget to gadget, from reader to reader or phone to reader or computer to reader or whatever other combination I can come up with, as I please without worrying over having to either hack the DRM, which is against the law I believe, or buy everything all over again.

Have you switched over from books to ebooks, partially or completely? If you have, what prompted you? If you haven’t, what’s holding you back? DRM? Price? Lack of wide availability of your chosen authors or genres? General reluctance to change?