Theftpad

Having recently read a pretty bad novella by Margaret Atwood, I found myself wondering whether my fond memories of her earlier work would stand up to re-reading. And then I saw that she's co-writing a zombie novel with a video game designer, and posting it on one of the silly semi-high-tech things she gets periodically  excited about: not that stupid long-distance remote-controlled biro, but a site called Wattpad, where people serially publish their books online.

Never having heard of it, I investigated Wattpad. What it seems to be is yet another nest of fan-fiction and related nonsense. What I found most interesting, browsing the "hot" titles, was how many of them have blatantly nicked their covers from films and TV shows. Here are a few examples.

Maya_2011's 'Dragon's Prize' pinches a promo phot of Aidan Mitchell from TV series Being Human

Tulipgardens' 'Hunting You, Hunting Me' pinches the movie poster for Norwegian horror film Thale

Steviekc's 'Aryan Nation' steals one of the famous images from the excellent Nazis-win-WW2 mockumentary It Happened Here

Almost everything else on the 'hot' list has as cover images pictures taken from Deviantart--I assume stolen, but can't prove it. If the covers are this shameless--not even derivative, but outright thefts--just how original and interesting are the books themselves going to be?

I think the remote-controlled biro was a better idea.

And speaking of tiresome zombie fiction, I see that these two books, first published in the UK...

..have been released in the US. But heaven forfend that a US-published book should have anywhere foreign on it...