Tuesday night, I was watching through one of my absolutely all time favorite comfort watches: “Sweet Danger,” a double episode of BBC’s Campion.
As I do, I got curious about seeing which of the Campion ebooks I have managed to accumulate — I have a complete run of the print books back when Felony & Mayhem had the license to print the print books — but…you know.
The First Oddity
What I found confused me, because while I wasn’t expecting to see the classic (to me) F&M covers, I was expecting to see the relatively profession covers of Open Road Media’s versions which have a certain panache. Instead, what I found was several variations of AI-generated content:
At least a solid handful of the books would still have the Open Road Media edition but would also have one of these newer versions priced lower so the “Albert Campion Series Page” is largely full of them. The general quality between the two covers is immediately obvious:
Now, AI book covers is not necessarily a truly-bad sign even if it is not necessarily ideal for hopes-getting-up, but I was also pretty confused (especially when care is not taken to capitalize “Albert” in the cover).
The Second Oddity
Allingham’s works are not, largely, in the public domain. Black Dudley2 is, and Mystery Mile. At least in the US (which Amazon dot com should be following).
Asimis is out of the Ukraine.3 They mostly cover the first four books so it is possible there is a different pub-dom situation there, or even a different licensing. Again, not sure how that impacts the American version of Amazon.com, but there you go.
There are two other publishers, though: “Unabridged Books” and “Adhyaya Books House LLP.” The latter is from India. Absolutely no clue about the first since it is effectively an impossible term to search with definite confidence. They bounce around in later volumes, here or there. Sometimes leading to copies with the completely wrong cover:
I have no idea the licensing, and so will assume this is all above board, but it does show how “manipulation” of prices can break Amazon’s Kindle listings when multiple versions of an ebook are available. Which can have some surprises for the end-user. Especially in the light of Amazon’s somewhat infamous 1984 incident back in 2009. [To this day, an incident taken majorly out of context by people who use to try and prove that Amazon is deleting books on the reg.]
NOTE: The Asimis books seem to be sub-licensed through De Marque who have a philosophy of accessible ebooks. Let me tell you how I know.
The Third Oddity (a two-fer)
In what is a perfectly Doug whoopsie, I accidentally fat fingered the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button while trying to simply scroll over to find out more about why there were multiple editions. That’s how I ended up with a copy of this book:
Right after mis-clicking, I let out a long sigh and then decided to look deeper to figure out more about what was happening. Here are some things I learned.
The Asimis illustrations seem to be taken from disparate sources. I do not mean to say that they are taken from various editions of Campion stories, they just seem to be either old images from other books or AI-generated images in an older, Victorian style. They “fit” the general shape of the passages to which they are attached, but also lead to a strange cognitive dissonance.
The Asimis text is different (with some typos/glitches but better reflow). I first noticed the missing quotes in the text at the start. To do some comparisons, I got my copy of the Felony & Mayhem paperback and went to the same chapter and had a little bonus surprise. The text was very slightly different. “Although you’re a foreigner, Squoire…” had no “Squoire” in the paperback. To check, I got the Open Road Media version of the ebook and checked it (yes, Space Pilgrims, thanks my misclick I now have multiple versions of the ebook on my Kindle…for accidental science!).
Not only does the Asimis have slightly different text with some additional words, in 70% of the cases it has better reflow with clearer paragraphs. Though, there are places where it breaks in other ways.
For those curious, in the print version it looks more like this in the Felony & Mayhem print book:
Open Road Media wins that fight, even if it’s paragraph spacing outside of it is lacking.
Here’s another change in text, though, where I like Asimis’s version:
I just like the “The name was a local one, derived” more than “The name was derived.” The former doesn’t really add anything but rhythm, and rhythm is important.
My guess is there is some difference between the American vs British text or some such, and that is causing it (Asimis using double-quotes in the American English standard).
The Fourth Oddities
Wrapping up, because this was more to document the strangeness rather than say anything particular [besides maybe Amazon should let you filter publishers more easily/readily and needs to control its dang Authority files…FRBR FRBR FRBR, amirite, ‘brarians?]
Here are two things I cannot confirm because I am not going to accidentally buy more copies of these books [please, fat fingers, please], but I saw two complaints while checking reviews that might be of importance:
(1) One reviewer of Mystery Mile said they were frustrated that it was simply a repackaged Black Dudley. The narratives of both are fairly different so my guess is that there is at least one version that gave one of the books the wrong title. I glanced through all the previews I could, but did not see it, but it could have been a paperback version. Or the reviewer might have been talking about broader themes.
(2) A reviewer of another “illustrated edition” said the the images were risqué. I have no idea their tolerance and have learned from experience that it could be anywhere from “lingerie” to full nudity.
Doug’s Final Thoughts
The primary final thoughts I have are, in order of importance to myself:
- You should read more Campion. Yes, you. Allingham was delightful.
- Campion needs a dang Blu-Ray+ edition.
- I would 100% adore a Sweet Danger movie as long as they accepted the weird mish-mash of gangsters, evil businessmen, satanism, English folklore, “Local shops for local people,” and twee flirtations.
- Amazon needs to figure out a way to keep this in control before it gets even worse when a billion versions of book can be insta-plagiarized by AI.
- While not a long list at the best of times, the only on-screen flirtation that makes me giggle more is from The Mummy and that one is practically cheating because damn, son. ↩︎
- StandardEbooks has a copy if you want it. ↩︎
- Another publisher is listed as Andrii Ponomarenko, also from the Ukraine and also from Kyiv, with very similar covers across the books and very similar by-lines, so I assume this is the same person/entity. ↩︎