Out of the Dust
"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie...." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. While others flee from the dust bowl, Billie Jo is left to find peace in the bleak landscape of Oklahoma -- and in the surprising landscape of her own heart. This Newbery Award winning book relates the hardships of the Depression in a series of poems.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2017–2019years
50% neutral50% critical
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What Hacker News says
- There's a distinction between the physical pages of the book and the text contained within the book. You own the physical pages of the book; you can use it as a paperweight, coaster, toilet paper, fireplace fuel, whatever.
You do not own the copyright on the words of the book, and in many of the cases you list, the publisher does have a say in that. If you want to put on a school play based on the book, you need to get permission from the author. (My high school put on an in-house adaptation of Out of the Dust, and we had to write Karen Hesse and get her okay to do so.) If you put the entirety of the book on your website so that readers of your negative review can refer back to it, the publisher can come after you with a cease & desist or, if you ignore it, a lawsuit. If you write fanfiction based on the characters in the book, the publisher can come after you with a C&D. If you want to make a movie based on that book, you need to buy the film rights. (There's currently an interesting situation with Game of Thrones where HBO owns the film rights to the world of Westeros, but the film rights to the characters & story of Dunk & Egg are still owned by GRRM, so if the film rights to the earlier Dunk & Egg stories were ever bought by a studio other than HBO, they would have to be scrubbed of mentions of Targaryens, the Iron Throne, King's Landing, etc.)
In the pre-Internet days, the chance of enforcement was next to nil for many of these cases, because the big studios and publishers all got licenses for any IP, while class discussions, high school plays, and hobbyists never got a wide audience for their work and so the original publisher would probably never know (unless you did something really stupid like send it to them). The Internet's blurred a lot of these boundaries.
- Good lord, suffer yourself to Belle Prater's Boy or Out of the Dust, and come back to me. Granted, that's just late 90s Newbury's, maybe they sucked less going forward.
If I wasn't already reading Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and Tolkien by that point, that kind of horseshit might have turned me off reading altogether at around 11-12.
