To Reflect

A post by Misa from The Magic Attic enlightened me about a recent drama happening in the book blogging world.
Apparently a book blog which has accumulated a significant number of followers engaged in a form of plagiarism yet was seemingly unwilling to acknowledge her faults.
I mean, come on.
Beautifully Invisible is right when she pointed out that the first 'apology' post The Story Siren made was directed not towards them, the victims of the plagiarism affair, thus making her sound unremorseful about the whole event.
From what I see, she was merely afraid of losing the respect she had gained over the year of the bloggers, as well as sponsorship of free books and ARCs from authors and publishers.
There, she earned points for bowing herself down to the BB community, saying how sorry she didn't set a good example as a leader.
But the thing she needed to do was to address the victims.
So she made a second post to "clarify".
I may be biased, having came to this matter from a negative POV towards The Story Siren, I admit.
But I simply don't eat what she said.
This coming from someone who posted about, who posted against plagiarism two years ago.
I know many bloggers have expressed their thoughts on this matter and compared the two posts made two years apart but I really can't help but want to highlight this ridiculous behaviour once again.

From her post on plagiarism made 16/04/2010:

Plagiarism isn’t just copying and pasting word for word and passing it off as your own. It can be taking someones work and changing around the sentence structure, getting out your thesaurus and changing a few words here and there... basically taking the central idea tweaking it and passing it off as your own work.

And now, from her clarification post made 24/04/2012:

I thought only content could be plagiarized. Changing a few a words around with a thesaurus, or simple copying and pasting content. It seems as though taking a general topic and rewriting it is plagiarism. That is simply my own ignorance on the matter, and I should have known better.

Seems like someone slapped herself in the face big time.
What a joke.

Many bloggers showed their concern for this topic on their own blog, some with really great arguments I must say, but since I've got the links from Misa's post anyway, I shall not link 'em from here.
What you should really do, is show some support for the two blogs who have been plagiarized from.
They made up some really good posts about combating plagiarism as well, totally worth a read.
Although, I must say they're two strong females, being able to come up with long posts with concrete proofs and arguments, leaving The Story Siren almost helpless in defending herself.
Definitely not someone to be rifled with.
I can only hope this drama would die down without further implications.


Another thing I want to link to from all these was actually an email, which I have no idea why it's being linked to this event, written by Kristi from The Story Siren to an 11-year-old blogger.
From the email, I gathered that this kid pushed her way into the blogosphere, shamelessly requesting books from authors and publishers repeatedly, causing some people to bring this matter to Kristi to be settled.
Which kind of reminds me of myself.
Of course, I didn't dare send multiple emails to authors and publishers for review copies.
But I guess I should somehow feel ashamed entering the various giveaways and not reviewing the books I've received from the generous bloggers.
Although 90% of them did not actually ask for reviews in return.
However I believe it's a courtesy, especially if the book came from the author himself/herself, to do so.
And also, there's the 10%.
Not to mention the authors who thought highly enough of me to have sent their books for me to review, or accepted my request to review their books.
And while I'm still writing out this post, I'd actually went to Netgalley to browse through the selection of ebooks available for request.
When I was auto-approved, I can only say Oops I did it again :/
Can't believe I just added on to the countless number of books I've to read and review.
I'm working on prioritizing them though.
Of course those with requests would go first.
Just hope my guilt would be enough to make me focus on these and finish them up real soon.
I can only put my library-borrowed Bloodlines aside for the moment.