User talk:NatGertler

I am mostly retired from article editing on Wikipedia, retaining my account primarily for taking care of promises I had made to help set up a small number of articles, to suggest reversion of damaging changes on pages I monitor, and to be able to request edits on pages related to myself and my work. Nonetheless, if you do need to contact me on something specific, a message on this talk page will still trigger an email and thus likely be seen.

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Legal threat

(The Happy Place is currently protected so I can't comment there, hence my missive here) I had a little look at this and the SPI. It seems to me it might be prudent to show the letter to Arbcom since they're the people who deal with off-wiki evidence and the like. They might, for instance, recognise a connection to a user via other off-wiki evidence we don't have (they maintain a private wiki that I assume is for collating such things?).

Truthfully, the answer will probably be 'thanks for showing us, very concerning, but it didn't connect to anything'. But, probably best checking and letting them decide that though. :) 78.149.135.163 (talk) 23:41, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I will keep that. in mind. Thanks. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 23:50, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ibid.

I just wanted to say I enjoyed your recent intervention in the IMDB section of the RSN. BobFromBrockley (talk) 16:35, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Richard Bach

It is nice to meet someone who interested in editing Richard Bach Bio, I am currently writing a large article on Russian Wiki about him, thank you for your help, will you participate? If it is so... where we can communicate with each other? Kira Leonic (talk) 09:05, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I can't say that I have a huge amount of information about Bach (nor any knowledge of Russian), and I have a lot of existing projects. As such, I'm not going to be able to offer much help. If you have specific questions, I'd be glad to answer what I can here on this talk page. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 11:44, 30 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's ok, we can freely communicate on English. I will ask you something later, glad to meet you! Kira Leonic (talk) 06:07, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Vanity publishing

Sorry I am not familiar with how to use talk. Was it really necessary to undo all my painstaking edits on the Vanity Press page, just because you objected to the changes in the first paragraph?

You may not have noticed that the first reference in the original version was a self-promotional citation for someone's book. The website I cited was promoting a business but it had good, solid, impartial information on that particular page and was the best source I was able to find.

Marisa Wright — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marisawriter (talk • contribs) 08:14, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

September 2024

Dear NatGertler, I actually really don't assume bad faith on your part, but I would like you to disengage from my contributions for a while. We both know that you have followed me around in the past. Let's just both cool that down a bit. I'm very sensitive about that for various reasons. Biohistorian15 (talk) 10:21, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to answer simply "no". You can ask me not to post on your talk page (where, since my posting a needed warning, my efforts have been to set up archiving as you seem to desire, and to note a place where your message was unclear due to a typo), but I am not going to give a problematic edit or an article with issues a pass because you're involved. My involvement at Talk:Robby Starbuck occurred because the issue arose on WP:BLPN, a board which I monitor regularly (BLPs being a particular concern of mine), post frequently (as of this morning, I've edited there 190 times as often as you have) and frequently peek in on the pages of the issues being raised to see if there's something I can easily address. I don't think it serves either me nor this project for me to ignore matters because you chose to involve yourself in them.

You do have the option of requesting an interaction ban at the administrators noticeboard, but I suspect you'd need to provide more concern that that I corrected some punctuation on some pages you'd been recently editing. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 14:50, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Again, I found none of your edits particularly troubling by themselves. I will not be requesting any sanctions obviously. Biohistorian15 (talk) 14:54, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Editor experience invitation

Hi NatGertler. I see that you're mostly retired from editing so feel free to ignore this message. I have this project where I interview other Wikipedians about their experiences here. I'm trying to gather a variety of perspectives and it tends to be difficult to find people who say "no" to wanting to edit for the foreseeable future. So if you'd be willing to chip in there, I'd appreciate it immensely. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 06:55, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My retirement has been less successful than intended, so I don't know if I'm that useful to you. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 12:48, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You're still useful if you wish to contribute. :) The more the merrier. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:15, 4 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Internet Archive book lending

Hi Nat. Just out of curiosity, what do you find objectionable about the example of a book you publish and is available on IA for one-hour lending? I'm obviously not a comics book publisher and I know you directly publish this book, but I would guess that there isn't much of a market for the 2006 edition of the 24-hour comic day collection. IA only lets people read it for an hour at a time, which is less time than a physical library would lend the book out to someone. Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 14:10, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Would you mind if someone broke into your house and stole some books, if they weren't books you were planning to read again anyway?

While I do still have some copies to sell at the rare times that I do retail (conventions and the like), I will admit that the 2006 is not as easy a sale as, say, the 2005 edition which IA has also pirated (that volume has the first distributed works of Fiona Staples, Faith Erin Hicks, and others.) The direct financial cost is not always the point. Considerable time, effort, and expense was put into putting that book together, in getting the rights, selecting the content, and designing it in an appealing way. It is under copyright, and will be for many years to come. I worked to get the rights, I paid to get rights for the contents. With that particular volume, I have the rights to (and have been considering) reissuing the exact same book under a slightly different title to not advertise its datedness. Copyright is designed to give rightsholders not just money but also control (the compulsory licenses and government price-setting for music is an exception.)

About Comics is primarily a reprint publisher. That means that much of my work is finding material that someone else thought there was no more worthwhile profits to squeeze from, and finding it a home. I have generated thousands of dollars of royalties for authors off of works that have been out of print for several decades. Had pirated versions been sopping up the interest and demand for those books over those decades, that would not have served these aging authors.

I put effort into designing the editions I publish, whether physical or digital, with proper considerations for each. IA just slams a physical edition on a scanner in whatever way is convenient to them and gets it on the screen somehow, and that's how they create their custom edition.

To knock away any possible talking points:

I myself made various About Comics publications available for free download during periods within COVID lockdown. This was done with the permissions of any rightsholders. I have no inherent objection to free books.
I myself have, in the past, donated to the Archive in support of their digitization of public domain materials.
I love libraries, from both a personal and business viewpoint. Actual libraries buy new copies of books when they are available, lend out the physical versions, and when wear and tear make a copy unsuitable for lending (which is generally a number in the dozens of borrows), they make a replacement copy. For ebooks, they pay a license.
I recognize and am fine with the legal exceptions for creating special-needs editions of works that do not have that available, and in fact have been (a fair while in the past) a volunteer reader for a local charity which creates audiobooks for blind and dyslexic students.
IA is not some cute little spunky charity. They're a business with (according to their Wikipedia article) $30 million in annual revenues and 169 employees... which is 169 times as many people as are here at About Comics, and more than that ratio in revenue. They may be small compared to some of the publishers which have the deep pockets to sue them, but to us, they are a behemoth, and to them, my concerns are nothing. That their business model is a combination of selling used books and asking people to keep giving them money so they can keep offering unlicensed ebooks to people does not make them not a business.

You're coming to me at a particularly difficult time to suggest that the rights to old works don't matter. Earlier this week, one of the creators I publish killed himself due in large part to poverty. The four-figure sum in royalties that we have given him over the past couple years, arising largely (but not solely) off of the reprints of decades-old, previously long-out-of-print material, was of course not enough to sustain him forever, but I'd like to think it let him keep around for just a while longer.

Perhaps you think I shouldn't care about any of this, or that you'd do things differently. Thing is, the laws I work within give me certain rights, making it my decision to make... not yours, and certainly no the Archive's. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 15:57, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

First, I am very sorry for the loss of your friend and collaborator. I also apologize if this came off as me thinking you shouldn't care about these issues or that I was trying to tell you to do things differently. As I stated, I only asked because I was curious about what drives your perspective, and I thank you for sharing it. I happen to agree with some of what you said. In particular, I don't disagree that some sort of licensing regime for these sorts of uses of copyrighted works would be appropriate. Best, voorts (talk/contributions) 16:14, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Sorry if I came off strident, but as I said, not the best time for getting a calm answer from me for this. Go in peace. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:19, 7 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Trump incident page move

Hello. Thanks for restoring the name. I mistakenly thought you had made the move. SPECIFICO talk 15:05, 26 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Edit warring

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on Public domain. This means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be although other editors disagree. Users are expected to collaborate with others, to avoid editing disruptively, and to try to reach a consensus, rather than repeatedly undoing other users' edits once it is known that there is a disagreement.

Points to note:

Edit warring is disruptive regardless of how many reverts you have made;
Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss controversial changes and work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing. You continue to add material not related to the public domain to the article, and continue to refuse to engage in Talk. Please stop. Wuerzele (talk) 20:45, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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