The blog that nets its owners a half-million Canadian a year publishes a lie about the cover of my first book. Apparently some wag, who links to the Amazon page for Building Accessible Websites, sees a resemblance with an infamous obscene image. You may research the Boing Boing posting yourself if you are interested in further details, though I see little reason why you would be interested in feverish malapropisms of this sort.
As I informed Xeni Jardin yesterday by E-mail:
I see BoingBoing is putting its usual talents in fact-checking and journalistic accuracy to work by publishing a link that claims the cover illustration of my first book is some kind of homage to an obscene image. Since Cory Doctorow knows me and I’m available by E-mail and instant messenger at a moment’s notice, BoingBoing could have simply asked if this were the case – but of course that is the sort of regard for accuracy we associate with old media, not a slapdash and profitable blog.
Even without actually asking the author about the book’s cover, any sensible person would probably assume that illustrator Matt Mahurin, a veteran of many Time magazine covers and music videos, would be unlikely to fall so short of original ideas that he would need to copy something obscene off the Web. We didn’t hire a top-flight illustrator to plant subliminal messages. Your contributor’s interpretation is totally false – and it says a lot about his perverted imagination and BoingBoing’s lack of journalistic standards.
Among its litany of flaws, BoingBoing has a frequent capacity for error. A day is a long time to leave an unresearched, false, and misleading blog posting uncorrected.