| Zhaba Zhournal | |||||
|
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
Dumbfuck author nomination Okay, I'm not writing this at work. And, to avoid being sued and/or fired, I will disguise the author, subject, and publication date of the book I'm about to rant about. Let's see...by randomly opening the "biography" section of my dictionary, I have selected a name; by randomly opening the New York Public Library Desk Reference, I have decided that the subject will be patent law; and the date is the year I graduated from college. So! I'm working on this book on patent law, converting the print copy into an electronic version. It has short-form bibliographic information at the end of each chapter, and the publisher wants us to expand this using the full bibliography in the back. Fine. I'm going through the chapter bibliographies, comparing the authors and dates to the full bib., and cutting and pasting the information. Except that, wait, I can't find an entry in the full bib. for "Collier 1997." There is no one named Collier in the entire bibliography. And no one in the bib. whose name begins with "C" published anything in 1997. Okay, I'll run a search through a good college library, like Yale, for a guy named Collier who wrote a book about patents. Ah, here's a person name Peter Collier who wrote "Your Guide to Patent Law," although the publication date is 2003, not 1997. Well, maybe it's a reprint. I'll look up the title on Alibris and see if there are any older editions. Okay. Here's the book. And...hey, that cover looks familiar...it looks just like... ...the book I'm working on. Yes, I am working on the 2003 book "Your Guide to Patent Law" by Peter Collier, in which he cites one of his previous works. The dumbfuck didn't include full publication information for his own book. Using the high-tech sleuthing method of reading the author biography on the back cover, I determine that he did indeed write another book on patents...in 1992, not 1997. The dumbfuck not only didn't include full publication information for his own book, he got the date wrong. Further Web searching is fruitless; I make a reasonably non-snide note in my error log and move on. Tomorrow I will write an even-less-snide e-mail to politely ask the publisher to ask the author to take his fucking copy of his own fucking book off his own fucking shelf and look at the copyright page, for God's sake. Without the word "fucking," of course. That's professionalism for you. [ at 9:25 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] |
|
||||
© 2003–05 Zhaba Productions, so don't steal anything.