Happiness is Straight Lines

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If you saw this book for sale, you would certainly be forgiven for assuming that it’s a book titled Happiness is a Warm Puppy, by the author Charles M. Schulz. After all, such a book does exist, a famed best-selling book in fact, and such a book would have that title and that name on the cover.

But no… this is a wide-ruled notebook, published via print-on-demand, which just happens to use that quote from Schulz as a decoration, and if you’re using that quote, you should really provide attribution, right?

This book was released this month… just a couple months before a legitimate hardcover reissue of the actual Happiness is a Warm Puppy book is coming out.

And if you don’t like this particular cover design, the same publisher issued two other editions of the wide ruled notebook last month, each with a listing title like “Happiness is a warm puppy | Charles M. Schulz: Notebook / Planner / Journal / Diary with a nice dog quote cover – 124 pages – 6×9 – wide ruled paper. Please read discribtion.” (Yes, it’s spelled “discribtion” every time.)

In fact, one can find many of these notebooks with either “inspirational” or “pet” quotes on them at Amazon simply by searching for the word “discribtion”. For example, there are multiple covers with this quote…

…but yes, we can expect that ASPCA president Roger Caras, whom they are quoting, actually knew that the plural of “life” is “lives” no matter what is shown on each over these covers.

I can certainly understand finding things that one can publish via print-on-demand easily that might generate some money, for I do that myself. But dadgummit, have some self respect, do it well, and be careful of trampling on the rights of others.

 

 

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