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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

ebooks: not written, but CREATED?

I spent the morning driving a rental car which was thankfully endowed with satellite radio. With this glorious tool I tuned into BBC Radio 1 and the Chris Moyles show who had Stephen Fry on as a guest. Having grown up with many a Blackadder reference/quote thrown around the kitchen table, and being one of the few people I know who knew Hugh Laurie was actually British prior to seeing him on an awards show with his accent coming through, I was excited to hear the interview. It proved to be truly entertaining as Fry is an incredibly intelligent and eloquent person who is inherently silly (the perfect combination for radio, really). Moyles talked about Fry's new book, The Fry Chronicles which has apparently just been released and covers his life from 1987 (when he met Laurie) on.
When I got home this evening I was very interested in seeing if I could track down a copy of this memoir and went to the kobo site to find it isnt available there. I skipped over to chapters to see if it has even been released in north America yet, and it doesn't appear to have been. As a last ditch effort, I tried the BC public library catalogue of ebooks. I selected the search function and entered "Stephen Fry", then clicked the drop down menu to choose author... But it wasn't an option. I could choose ISBN (the numbering system for all books), Title, or Creator. Maybe it's just that I'm over-tired right now, but using the term "creator" seems, well, a bit grandiose, doesn't it? And really, if it's a memoir, aren't we now treading into existentialist territory? Fry has written about his life...is he the creator of his own life, or did someone/something else do the creating for him? If so, doesn't that make all authors who are dubbed "creators" by the BC library system just plagiarizers? Yeah, that's right, I went there. Chew on that for a while...

1 comment:

mum said...

I wondered about that too - why not author? - but figured it had something to do with electronic media, copyrights, drm and whatnot and that the ebooks are not written in that format. Curious though and "creator" an interesting term. It conjures up an image of stars and TARDUSes or would that be TARDI. Who knew having an ereader would be such a multilevel experience?