I went to the Sony ebookstore this morning to see if any of my books were there yet -- I've signed up with an aggregator to get THE WOODS, A RAIN OF PEBBLES, and A TAPESTRY OF TWELVE TALES there, since unlike Amazon, Apple, and B&N, Sony doesn't allow individual authors to place their books: you have to be a "publisher" to do that.

Searching for "Stephen Leigh" returned far too many hits -- Sony must have a strangely non-specific search engine -- but the second one was A TAPESTRY OF TWELVE TALES.... My title, my cover, but the author was someone named "Robert Zubrin". You can see it here -- my book, my description, but the author and the author information are for Robert Zubrin.

Huh. That's not good.

Clicking on the link for Robert Zubrin's name made things worse. My books DARK WATER'S EMBRACE and SPEAKING STONES -- reprinted by Arc Manor Books -- are also attributed to his authorship. You can see them here and here. Again, my books, my description, but the author information is for Robert Zubrin.

I can only make the assumption that Robert Zubrin may have been receiving royalties for sales of those books -- and DARK WATER'S EMBRACE and SPEAKING STONES have been out from Arc Manor for a few years now.

Obviously, I don't know if this is a common problem with ebooks or with Sony or whether I've just been 'lucky'. I've never seen a similar issue with my print books, but that doesn't mean that mis-attribution doesn't happen there as well. However, I do want it cleared up. Arc Manor and my aggregator have both been notified, since I have no direct contact with Sony. I'll let you know what happens.

FWIW, there's no listing that I can find for THE WOODS or A RAIN OF PEBBLES by searching on the Sony site, which strikes me as strange. I wonder how they're listed...

From: [identity profile] minnehaha.livejournal.com


http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/ebook_fraud.html

B

From: [identity profile] sleigh.livejournal.com


I don't think it's that. Looking up Robert Zubrin, the other books (non-fiction) attributed to him are indeed his and he has serious credentials. I think it's just a weird foul-up by Sony. I've heard from the aggregator; they'll be calling Sony to straighten it out.

From: [identity profile] minnehaha.livejournal.com


That's better -- it'll be easier to solve.

E-mail Zubrin and let him know. You can both laugh at it together.

B

From: [identity profile] trektone.livejournal.com


Yow, that's bad! Hope it doesn't take too long to get cleared up. I recently read about such mix-ups (Joshua Bilmes' blog?). Maybe you'll get enough pocket change for a new e-reader.

Btw, I have a Robert Zubrin (print) novel somewhere. It was hard sf and okay.
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