As has been covered exhaustively in Q&Q and elsewhere, publishers have been spending a lot of time of late trying to make use of the promotional possibilities of Web 2.0 phenomena like YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace.
There are rules, however, as House of Anansi Press discovered when its Facebook profile was deleted without notice. Their crime? Facebook demands that each profile correspond to an actual person, and Anansi is, well, not a person. (Neither are some of the fictional characters who have created their own profiles on the site – such as a couple from Todd Babiak’s newest novel – but that’s another matter.)
Think of it like zoning: you can’t live in a mall, and – theoretically, at least – you can’t open a store in your living room.
In response, Anansi’s online content developer, Julie Wilson, has posted an “address to Facebook” on YouTube.
You can watch it below:
(hat tip: That Shakespeherian Rag)
It should be noted that Anansi hasn’t been kicked off Facebook entirely: they still maintain the groups House of Anansi Press and the Anansi Review Crew. It’s just their personal profile that was removed.
Within a few days they were back up, this time as part of the new Facebook profile listings now available to products or businesses.
[...] Now Facebook is removing profiles of small Canadian publishers, reports Quill & Quire on its Quillblog. House of Anansi, the Toronto-based publisher of books such as Lisa Moore’s Alligator and Ronald [...]
From The National Post:
“Sounds like she still needs some instruction on the whole person versus non-person distinction. ”
People play by different rules in the online world. Facebook surely knows that. And they let us kick around for so long, I’d suspect, with utter glee because we used that space extremely well. They learn from this lack of distinction. Keeps them flexible. In this instance, subversion was fun, fun, fun. Perhaps even better than “Cats.”
fun, i suppose, but subversive? it’s about as subversive as when doug pepper waxed all excited about the tattoo on one of M&S’s newly signed scribblers.