New novel -- Edison as serial killer; novelist plagiarizes

[phonojim]

I'm not much of a fan of "historical" fiction because most of it is neither historical nor good fiction. Sorry to hear about the theft of your material. My wife published a non-fiction book which cost us several thousand dollars out of pocket and it failed to sell. However, later on, some of the ideas in the book started turning up in other places, not ver batim, or even as close as this guy came to your writing, so we can't really claim plagiarism, but we can see where these others got "their" ideas. Frustrating, but if we tried to do something we would probably spend a lot on lawyers and not get anywhere. In your case, its pretty obvious and I hope you can go after him and make him pay in some form.

Jim

[Edisone]

Strange how the book's official website features only a picture of Tesla. Clueless indeed.
http://www.inventingmadness.com/

plus what is surely Maxim's light bulb on the cover.

[TinfoilPhono]

After seeing my review the author emailed me a weak apology along with a belated request for permission to use the material already in the book, but now with due credit.

By the beginning of next week, Kindle and future print-on-demand issues will acknowledge my work. I suggested that if she quoted any other sources without attribution she should look into expanding the acknowledgments accordingly. I'd be surprised if there aren't some other near-verbatim transcriptions in it.

It's so much more pleasant when people simply ask me upfront for permission. Just this morning I got a request from the Computer History Museum to use a photograph of my Edison doll in a display they are creating. I was happy to send them a high resolution image.

I find it endlessly fascinating that of all the things on my site, the doll attracts by far the most inquiries for republication. It has now been used in at least 6 books, and more articles than I can count -- including National Geographic and Time. Of course, those are the ones who asked. I have no idea how many others have appropriated the images and/or text without credit.

EDIT TO ADD: For the heck of it I uploaded the doll photo from my site to a Google Image search and came up with well over 200 unauthorized repostings. I randomly looked at a couple of dozen with unfamiliar links, none gave credit back to my site. I guess the concept of requesting permission before appropriating content is a thing of the past. I suppose I need to look into watermarking all my photos and re-uploading them, although that's probably a waste of time since the genie is out of the bottle and the existing ones will be stolen and re-stolen for years to come.

[TinfoilPhono]

As a sidebar to this tale of unauthorized use, I just got an email from someone wanting to know when I will be offering refrigerator magnets with my 1892 Crocker-Wheeler bipolar fan. Huh? Well, it appears someone on eBay took a photo of another fan from my website and is selling refrigerator magnets with my picture.

Unavoidable, it seems.........

[phonogfp]

We were doing a photo shoot about 10 years ago at a collector's house, when I noticed a couple of tin signs on his wall. They looked awfully familiar... Sure enough, they were images of extremely rare Edison dealer posters that we had included in a couple of our books as full-page images. Every little tear, crease, or blemish was the same. "Made in China." Unavoidable indeed!

George P.