Friday, January 25, 2013
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
If you look around the Internet for information on Booster Gold, you might discover a book titled Influential Superheroes of All Time: Booster Gold attributed to Elizabeth Dummel. This 240-page book is one in a series assembled by Ms. Dummel about comic book super heroes. If dig a little deeper into this book, you'll invariably encounter this disclaimer from the publisher:
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. This book presents a fictional biography of one influential superhero character that greatly influenced the world, Booster Gold. This book puts together a showcase of the character's fictional biography and his influence over the world's culture. Read about Booster Gold's powers and abilities, enemies, creators, and more.
"Free sources online"? Has the information been vetted to validate unqualified statements on Wikipedia about Booster speaking "Esperanto as his first language"? (Besides a joke by Blue Beetle, there is no proof of this.) Does the book use the information from Adherents.com to identify Booster Gold as an atheist? (Another one-off punchline with no other supporting evidence.) How seriously does the book take reports from FanExpo 2011 about Booster's New 52 Canadian citizenship? (Much reported, never repeated in canon.) And most importantly, does that mean that the book includes content from Boosterrific.com?
The publisher, Webster Digital Services, defends the book's content as legal under under Creative Commons licensing. That may be technically true, but don't expect any great insight from their copy-and-paste publications of Google search results.
For awhile, the book was available on Amazon.com, although that no longer seems to be the case. Copies are still on eBay.com and BarnesandNoble.com for about $25 apiece. If that's the going rate for republished Wikipedia entries, the content at Boosterrific.com must be priceless!
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