by chrismorgan on 10/4/23, 8:11 AM
by haunter on 10/4/23, 8:54 AM
This pisses me off in video games. Fantasy world and they insert a product placement. FFXV for example with the Nissin cup noodles
https://static1.dualshockersimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/...Which is also strange because you would think SE values their flagship franchise more. Like not sure Nissin were paying _that much_ even.
by pferde on 10/4/23, 8:05 AM
The way Mr. Pratchett describes the ad, it reminds me a lot of the ads one of his characters kept adding to their "moving pictures" in the book of the same name (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Pictures_(novel) ).
Perhaps this incident is where he got the idea from?
by i_don_t_know on 10/4/23, 9:34 AM
I have a copy of that edition and I remember being very confused and annoyed by the ad. It's also something I don't remember seeing in other books but I could be wrong.
I switched to reading his novels in English (imports from the UK, expensive but worth it).
by rf15 on 10/4/23, 10:08 AM
Heyne is well known by now for their questionable translation work, at least in the genre fiction section. Covers get modified towards more blandness, language gets defanged, etc..
One of the more prominent examples in recent times is their translation of Gideon the Ninth and its sequels (international bestseller, Nebula and Hugo shortlisted, "easy money" when importing a work). It went so badly they apparently stopped publishing the series altogether past the second book.
by SilverBirch on 10/4/23, 9:13 AM
Well this website sets a new low for the increasingly terrible experience of browsing the modern internet. Pop up at the top? Nope. Pop up from the bottom? Nope! Pop up from the right hand side covering
half my entire browsing window with no option to close it.So what I gather from this article is
>Did you know that German
>paid product placement into
>international writers? Yes, it’
>this Neil Gaiman thread).
Great. Thanks for that.
by riidom on 10/4/23, 9:08 AM
by blkhawk on 10/4/23, 8:41 AM
Okay, this is actually something I remember from Fantasy and Scifi Books. I had totally forgotten that was a thing :D
I think my German editions of the Skylark series by E.E.Smith have this.
by luckystarr on 10/4/23, 8:15 AM
I remember this ad. I read a different book from the same publisher back in the days and was completely offended by having an ad in a book I just bought. The upside was that it could be removed without removing any text from the book.
by wizofaus on 10/4/23, 8:59 AM
The main problem is surely that everything about modern life that Pratchett tangentially referred to was inevitably the victim of his mockery of how absurd it was - so were an ad for instant soup to appear halfway through the adventures of Rincewind, Sam Vines or (my personal favourite) Lord Vetinari, it would surely be interpreted by any half-clued-in reader as an object of ridicule...
by ryzvonusef on 10/4/23, 11:24 AM
I don't get it, why do this, when you would just insert a pamphlet of an ad between the pages of each book (as a bookmark) or put a single 4sheet of ad between the pages as it is bound?
Both would be unacceptable to me, but at least it wouldn't be AS horrifying as literally editing the text and putting product placement in between the story lines.
there is evil and then there is stupid.
by nikanj on 10/4/23, 8:35 AM
Meanwhile this is such an everyday thing in film/tv. Product placements are 1) everywhere 2) really blatant.
by rsynnott on 10/4/23, 9:11 AM
I wonder is product placement/native advertising a thing in literature at all. It's certainly a big deal in TV; that's why, despite no human who did not actually work for Microsoft ever having bought a Windows Phone 8 device, House of Cards was full of them, say.
by Semaphor on 10/4/23, 8:17 AM
Wow, I’m German, but I never heard of anything like this. Though I now remember first/last page ads in sci-fi pulp novels from the 70s/80s, never thought much of that :D
by ggm on 10/4/23, 8:51 AM
The comments on the blog are wierd. "Yea, but because Rupert Murdoch ate my baby, this isn't as bad so it's OK so"
It's not OK to fuck around with an authors words.
by LeonB on 10/4/23, 8:16 AM
A thing contained an ad.
(But anything related to Terry Pratchett probably gets my upvote.)
