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Fascinating recent plagiarism case from the New Yorker. Spy novel written by author who was "undercover" in the sense that he was secretly writing everything with passages lifted from other novels. 

What strikes me as especially interesting about this book review is that it emphasizes and leads with the buzz surrounding its predominantly digital publication instead of the controversy about the popularity of hardcore erotic literature for women.

I talked about this in class and I've posted on this before, but when I first posted this the idea was still in the inchoate stages of development. Now you can click on different chapters of the story and there will be a menu on the right hand side that shows animated versions of people added to the story. By clicking on this drawing, the story will advance to the period where this person makes a guest appearance and will show the real photo used for the drawing which is sometimes a facebook profile picture. Why I think this is especially interesting is that it has elements of IF that are in use in electronic literature, but it also creates a participatory community based around a specific exigency which is buying products from AXE.

This probably seems ridiculous that I'm sharing this, but this directly relates to a paper I wrote last semester about the rhetoric employed by AXE and now I think they're making a move that applies to this class. Here we have some combination of McLuhan's idea of media being an extension of man and we see elements of IF as people actively contribute the making of a graphic novel and then are characterized by the creators for their input all the while fusing their digital selves to some sort of global and digital AXE alliance. Imagine how difficult it would be to by a different product once you become part of their story and your digital self participates (to channel the ideas of Barry Brummett) in this particular reality.