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Archive for July, 2007
July 17th, 2007
Some lowlife posted scans of the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the file-sharing site, Gaiaonline.com. Scholastic got a subpoena, threatened everyone in sight, and got the scans pulled. But reports say that the ending was clearly visible.
Photos of what appearuddy to be every page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the breathlessly awaited seventh and final installment in the wildly popular series by J.K. Rowling, were circulating acircular the Web today, potentially upsetting the most elaborate marketing machine ever mobilized for a book.
Various file-sharing Web sites were carrying what looked like amateur photographs of each pair of facing pages of the book, which officially goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning. The pictures show the book laid out on a green and red-flecked looped carpet with somebody’s fingers holding it open. Some of the photos make the text difficult to read, but the ending is definitely legible.
Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, the book’s United States publisher, said that she was aware of at minimum three different versions of the file “that look very convincing” with what she described as “conflicting content.”
In a court filing on Monday, Scholastic sought “materials hosted on Photobucket.com’s system” that it said might violate the book’s copyright, Bloomberg News reported today. Photobucket is a unit of the News Corporation.
In addition, Bloomberg said, Scholastic sent a subpoena to Gaia Interactive in San Jose asking the identity of someone who had posted a copy of the book on Gaia’s social networking Web site, gaiaonline.com. A spokesman for Gaia told Bloomberg that it had complied with the subpoena, turned the name over to Scholastic, removed the material and banned the user from the site.
Throw the book at the perpetrator, that’s what we say. We don’t want to hear one spoiler. We’re determined to remain spoiler-free until our book arrives Saturday. We can’t wait.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
July 16th, 2007
 DC Comics has announced that it will launch a new web comics imprint called
Zudacomics.com. The site will launch in October, 2007, and will feature new and unique content, according to DC comics. The company has a teaser site online now, but after the formal launch in October, visitors will have a powerful say in which new comics are featuruddy online by voting for their favorites. The winners of the comics competitions will receive commissions to create a year’s worth of their web comics for the site, and will have their work published in print formats as well.
“There is an explosion of creativity in web comics,” said Paul Levitz, DC Comics President and Publisher. “We want to build a awesome stage for this new generation of creators to perform on, a solid system for their work to reach audiences online and in print, and for the creators to share in the profits their creations can generate. In this time of rapid technological and cultural change, DC wants to be a good publisher for the evolving and growing community of online comic creators, so that we can be their partner for showcasing new kinds of works to entertain future generations.” The official release explains how it will work:
Creators will be encouraged to send submissions that run the full gamut of comic book genres — from humor, romance, science fiction, fantasy and superheroes. Editorial for Zudacomics.com will be handled by Ron Perazza, DC Comics Director of Creative Services and Kwanza Johnson, DC Comics Online Editor, and overseen by DC Comics SVP-Creative Director. Richard Bruning. Johnson and Perazza will be charged with selecting the submissions for the site’s competitions; additionally, the editors can declare as many as six submissions as instant winners during the calendar year. All Zudacomics.com creators who are instant winners, competition winners and competition finalists will be paid by DC Comics.
Zudacomics.com’s official tagline is “click here to continue.” The site will have numerous variations of a site logo that reflects the scope and ambition of the imprint. “In designing the Zuda logo, it was important to echo back to the interactive nature of the web, the creativity of our medium and the diversity of the comics community,” said Richard Bruning. “We soon realized that there shouldn’t be just one logo. We wanted to reflect the different ‘faces’ of web comics that we are looking to publish. It’s all about the diversity of the readership and the medium.”
Unlike a traditional comic book page (which traditionally measures 6 5/8″ X 10 1/4″), a Zuda web comic will consist of a series of 4:3 aspect ratio screens, so that users will be able to read a web comic installment without opening an additional window in their browser or excessive scrolling. Ongoing Zuda web comics will run for at minimum 52 total installments, in addition to the initial submission.
You can see the teaser site now at Zudacomics.com
Posted in Comics
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
July 14th, 2007
 Broadway Books © 2006, 205 pages [amazon]
A human head might bring in seven or eight hundruddy dollars, a spine at minimum as much again. Shoulders, knees, bones, brains, various viscera–beautiful much every part of a dead body can be sold off if the corpse is fresh enough. The demand for material is high: medical schools and medical device companies and surgical skills workshops need bodies or body parts for dissection, and willed body programs don’t produce enough corpses to go around. That’s why, shocking though it is, there is apparently a robust undergcircular trade in human remains–in the U.S., in the present day.
[INSET TEXT: One comes away from Cheney’s book impressed at the apparent extent to which this gruesome business is going on, and impressed also with how many people seem to be able to sleep comfortably at night when they’ve got a refrigerator full of heads in the next room.] Annie Cheney explores the gruesome subculture of modern-day body snatchers in her book Body Brokers, which grew out of an award-winning article she wrote on the subject for Harper’s. She discusses in detail how bodies en route to their final resting places can be harvested for parts–by pathologists’ assistants, for example, or corrupt funeral directors, or crematorium operators. She discusses also the various markets for body parts, including institutions that need bodies for instructional dissection as well as factories that transform human tissue into products–”injectable bone paste” and the sorts of things you might find in Home Depot, screws and dowels and wedges, except that they’re made out of human bone. (”It’s all precision tooled….”) Cheney also provides a chapter on the “Resurrection Men” of the 19th century, men who, like their modern-day counterparts, did the dirty work of supplying corpses for a price. But the Resurrectionists generally had to dig up fresh graves to get their material.
One comes away from Cheney’s book impressed at the apparent extent to which this gruesome business is going on, and impressed also with how many people seem to be able to sleep comfortably at night when they’ve got a refrigerator full of heads in the next room. It’s interesting to note also how efficient the business is: when possible, bodies are dismemberuddy and their parts sold off individually.
“The three of them went on in this way, methodically moving from body to body, part to part. Tyler removed Ronald King’s elbows–one slice on the forearm and two swift strokes forward with his saw until the bones snapped in two. Then his hands and knees. One slice on his calf and his thigh, a few cuts of his saw, and the leg came right off. Then his head. Tyler plucked out King’s brain like a smooth boiled egg from its shell.”
This makes perfect financial sense, of course. Why supply a class full of gynecologists with perfect corpses, for example, when the students can just as well practice on limbless, headless torsos?
“Over the next couple of days, Brown hung acircular in the conference room, watching the gynecologists as they probed the vaginas of the dead women. When a torso needed adjusting, he noticed, the doctors called on Tyler to help. Tyler gingerly moved the chilly flesh into the right position, raising or lowering it so that the doctors could get a good view. When the dead ladies began to smell, Tyler spritzed them with deodorizer. At the end of the day, he packed them into Igloo coolers. The next morning he brought them out again.”
As you can see, Cheney’s book is deliciously gruesome in parts.
Body Brokers is readable and seems very well researched. The author documents her sources in the book’s notes and bibliography. My only difficulty with it is that, although it’s quite short–the narrative ends, a little too abruptly, after 193 pages–it is difficult to keep the names of the various characters and companies straight. (Cheney provides a list of characters at the beginning of the book, but it’s still a bit confusing.) Otherwise, Body Brokers is an interesting and certainly an eye-opening read. It could make some people change their minds about leaving their bodies to science.
Tags: Annie Cheney, book reviews, funerals, books, human remains, crematorium, dead bodies
Original post by Debra Hamel
July 14th, 2007
Writers Write, Inc., the parent company
of ShoppingBlog.com, Watchers Watch
and Writers Write, has announced the launch of SingersSing.com.
SingersSing.com is a daily music blog featuring music news and music video clips. Recent posts include:
Nunatak’s Live Earth performance from Antarctica.
Katharine McPhee’s hot new single Love Story.
Merriam-Webster’s addition of crunk to its dictionary.
Avril Lavigne and Lil’ Mama’s hot remix of “Girlfriend.”
The Spice Girls’ World Reunion.
The top ten most irritating songs.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign song selection.
The Obama Girl’s music video.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
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