So, recently I saw a new one-volume LotR with a beautiful golden cover illustrating some scene that I didn't recognize —some ceremony involving an elf, probably in some great underground cavern, was all that I cd make out.
When I turned to the credits page to see whose work this is, I was surprised and distressed to find there's no artist credited. Instead this striking piece is credited (on the outside of the book, in the bottom left corner, half-buried in the art) to 'Amazon Content Services LLC'. Is this a well-known entity I shd have heard about before now? Or some corporate department within Amazon? For my part, I feel strongly, after all my years as an editor, freelancer, and independent scholar, that it's important that credits accurately reflect who was responsible for what: writing or painting or composing or whatever. Otherwise it's hard to track who actually did what. But the example given here doesn't give me enough information.
Here's the cover:
And here's a close-up of the actual credit (courtesy of Janice).
--John R.
--current reading: THE GREAT TALES NEVER END (John Garth's essay)
1 comment:
I think the comment by someone in our discussion the other night is as good an explanation as any; the image comes from Amazon's The Rings of Power and so "Amazon Content Services" is an appropriate entity to credit for the image. The following thoughts just occurred to me as I read your post:
1) It makes sense that a separate division of Amazon would be credited for creative works developed by Amazon as there are probably legal benefits to distinguishing between the part of Amazon developing creative works and the part that is just a retail operation (albeit an enormous one).
2) If the image comes from The Rings of Power, it seems to me that it would be impossible to identify a single individual (or a small number of individuals) to be credited. Producer, director, the people that wrote the script for that moment, the actors involved...the number quickly adds up.
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