I've come to notice through a question in one of my online bookbinding community that there's some odd non-issue that is for some reason or another is a big deal, particularly to those who probably need a different hobby: bookbinding fanfiction.
Not publishing it the same way that a regular book that sits in a bookstore is published - which would be a different issue, mainly to do with copyright because the person is now making the fanfic they wrote a commercial product and thus can make money off it. At least work it into an actual original story first before you make it hit stores.
We're just talking about plain ol' stitching a book together by hand and that's it.
It's bookbinding. How it is a copyright breaking act to just stitch a book is a great demonstration of the phrase "The Stupid, It Burns".
You can handbind anything, from the wackadoodle fanfic you made to a Quran or a Bible. The fanfic is yours and if you have the skillset to turn the digital copy into a physical copy, have at it. To be honest, when I first heard the question, I thought I had missed a much more earnest, thought-provoking question that pertained to restoring books and book preservation but newp, it was something pretty flatliningly inane. I wasn't the only person confused in the bookbinding comm, either.
Do people genuinely get emo over this? Turns out, some do because, whoo, it's apparently some debate by people who honestly could have spent their time doing better things with it.
I stitch my works all the time. It allows me to work on my bookbinding skill whilst not wasting paper and materials with making pretty books that I'll never use. It's art, duh. It also lets me see my work in physical, complete book form, which for some writers, that's all the validation they need for their work and the time they spent on it. That it isn't just a random file on their computer but something existent. The end. Not a whole lot there.
I see fanfic as training wheels when it comes to writing practice. I've written it when I was younger, many authors have started out writing via writing fanfic. It gives great practice in learning how to craft a story using ready-made characters and worlds while you learn how to get a better grip on how to write creatively, thus the training wheel analogy.
Bookbinding is a skill that requires a lot of steady practice. It eats up materials and you wind up with a bunch of empty, blank books in the end. It seems a good worthwhile idea, in a way, to stitch fanfic (which, by the way, you need a special software usually to properly collate pages for books and booklets, such as Booklet Creator - or have fun stitching single pages of 8.5x11" pages, which is big) as it creates practice for bookbinding and, oh look, you get a physical book out of it.
If you don't sell it, but instead give it to others or trade with others as gifts or things like that, I don't see where the issue is. Sounds like pretty standard nerd behavior to me. Welcome to learning how people shared fanfic before the advent of the internet? ¯\(o-o)/¯ I still have print outs of someone's fanfic based off rock band Linkin Park called "The Linkins" to this very day. The digital version no longer exists because the website is now gone due to the fact internet now doesn't look like internet then but I still have my printouts, which, yep, I still read them from time to time. It's not handbound (because I didn't have the skill at the age of 15), it's plainly stapled together but I still have it. The men of LP are not going to come through my windows over it, neither will their lawyers, nor have any of them ever. And I now have friends who are close friends of the men of LP 🙃 (I didn't when I was 15. I would have died from fan-overload.) It isn't a big deal.
If you sell it:
1) Congrats, you better have top-notch bookbinding artistic skill to outpace your fanfic writing - which takes years - because otherwise, talk about wasting someone else's money. Also, it's going to get unsustainable fast because the price (due to the bookbinding) will be ballooned due to all the work that goes into bookbinding - assuming you're not going to just saddle stitch down some folded paper the center, slap on a exorbitant price tag and call it a day. At that point, you're just scheming someone.
2) That sounds like an easy way to land in copyright hot water. You are selling art via the bookbinding but you're not selling a blank, handstitched journal. You are selling a story that is baldly based on someone else's story. At minimum, learn how to craft that story into an original story (take the training wheels off, so to speak) and then have at it.
Frankly, this anxiety that new writers and bookbinders have about the Copyright FBI kicking down their door over a small stab-bind journal they made based off whatever book they like is honestly overblown and wholly pointless.
No comments:
Post a Comment