User talk:Sf

Welcome!

Hello, Sf, and welcome to the ISFDB Wiki! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out the community portal, or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Marc Kupper 15:28, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)

Oceans of the Mind

SF - I had rejected your submission of Night of Sevens by Paul Marlowe in the Oceans of the Mind magazine and asked that the entire table of contents for the magazine issue be submitted. I did some follow-up on this and it turns out the magazine itself does not fall within ISFDB's rules of acquisition (see item #12 at the bottom of the page) meaning you do not need to resubmit it. Marc Kupper 15:28, 29 Dec 2006 (CST)

"I did some follow-up on this and it turns out the magazine itself does not fall within ISFDB's rules of acquisition (see item #12 at the bottom of the page)"

Marc - I was wondering if this magazine really falls into the category of e-zines that you want to exclude from isfdb. It is (or was) a quarterly PDF sent only to subscribers, and the editors contracted for first serial rights, so the editors are not actually contractually entitled to re-publish the material again in any of the ways mentioned in item no.12 (updated, revised, etc.), any more than a print magazine could re-publish an old issue with all of the stories in it.Sf 09:10, 23 Jan 2007 (CST)

Sf - I would love to include Oceans of the Mind in ISFDB as it seems close to the material we do include.” The problem is, if we let one eZine in then that opens the door to many similar eZines and soon we are spending a bunch of time deciding on a case-by-case basis if something should or should not be included. For example, you have a good point about the contracts but how could we verify that these contracts exist?

ISFDB started out as an index of print magazine and book publications meaning

1. People could get their hands on a physical copy of each story.
2. That the story itself would not change. In other words, once a work was published that particular work can be inspected and the words in it will be the same 100 years from now as they are today.
3. The story has been vetted by editors and presumably meets the editorial standards for the publication it appears in. Unfortunately, technology has caught up with us and with the print-on-demand vanity press industry it’s possible for books to appear that that have not been vetted. We are still struggling with this in ISFDB.

As eZines bypass #1, #2, and in many cases #3 too we need to come up with policies and procedures that would allow us to mimic #1 to 3 above before they can be included in ISFDB. For example, #1 and 2 could be handled if a physical copy of the eZine was stored in ISFDB’s server but that raises copyright and licensing issues that need to be dealt with. For #3 we need to become editors.

eZines have triggered a lot of discussion within ISFDB with net result being that we added item #12 to the rules of acquisition meaning the Oceans of the Mind magazine was excluded other than issue #1 which was distributed in on-paper form along with the PDF version. Marc Kupper 11:35, 23 Jan 2007 (CST)

Though it's understandable from a practical point of view, it seems an unfairly arbitrary and somewhat Ludditish rule (not to mention a rule at odds with the spirit of speculative fiction, which embraces new technologies) to exclude all electronic publications. Consider, for example, the former magazine at scifi.com, which payed 20¢/word and attracted a lot of big-name authors. It seems to be leaving a big hole in the bibliographic resource to exclude a growing medium, when national libraries such as http://www.collectionscanada.ca/electroniccollection/003008-1000-e.html are adding electronic publications to their legal deposit programs.

Regarding the three rules:

1. If it's a bibliographical resource rather than a library, it shouldn't be necessary to story copies of eZines in your servers.

2. & 12 As far as change is concerned, is this a real or a hypothetical problem? I strongly suspect that editors of eZines don't have the time to fiddle with works after publication simply because an author wants to changes something. They usually have barely enough time to sort through new submissions, much less go on tweaking already-published ones ad infinitum.

Superficially, electronic publications seem ephemeral, but is it really likely to be more difficult to find the average eZine after ten years, considering the cheapness and easiness of keeping things online, compared with the difficulty of finding an issue of a short-lived paper magazine that had a circulation of 100?

3. It doesn't seem likely that you're any more likely to find good editing in a small print magazine than you are in a small eZine - assuming they're both markets that pay equally.Sf 20:20, 23 Jan 2007 (CST)

Treason in Eswy by Johansen

I accepted your submission of this new publication, but had to make a few changes. For paperback bindings, use the abbreviation "pb" (for hardcovers, use "hc", and trade paperbacks are "tp"). Also place the dollar sign (if the price is in dollars) before the price, so it should be "$9.95". Thanks for your submission. Mhhutchins

I just noticed that your submission didn't leave a space between the first and second initials of the author's name, in effect creating a new author. That's why it didn't show up on K. W. Johansen's page. It was on a new page for K.W. Johansen. I'll correct the author's name. I also noticed that you made another submission for the same publication. Please allow the moderators time to check out the submission. There may not be a mod currently online, but we'll eventually get to your submission. Thanks again. Mhhutchins 10:10, 18 Feb 2008 (CST)