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Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 12:53 pm
by Benjamin
Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy
John Asmussen
ISBN 978-1781550397

Any opinions on this one?

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:28 pm
by Olaf
I don't have it. What's your opinion? Is it worth buying? Or is it just one more Bismarck book?


Happy reading ~ Olaf!

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 3:47 pm
by DaveDecadent
I have it. It contains a great many photos which you may have/not seen before, some in colour. I've not read it yet as i've a back up of at least 8 Bismarck books in the queue so don't hold your breath. :oops:

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:08 pm
by Benjamin
I have no idea.
I don't have the book either!

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 5:11 pm
by tommy303
His book on the Tirpitz is excellent, so I am sure this one will be at least as good.

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2013 12:28 am
by José M. Rico
Benjamin wrote:Any opinions on this one?
Yes, but unfortunately not very good.

The text on this book contains a considerable number of excerpts and quotes that have been taken from kbismarck.com website. In some cases directly copied verbatim, in others simply changing the sentence structure to try to conceal any wrongdoing. There are also a couple of battle maps that have just been redrawn over those made by myself years ago, as well as several other cases where data has been clearly misused. I have compiled a few samples in the following link which illustrate what I'm talking about:

http://www.kbismarck.com/copy001.html

I must say that I never gave the author of this book permission to use any of the material available at kbismarck.com. If at least proper credit would have been given, but I was not even consulted about this. :kaput:

Sorry, but I can not recommend you this book.

BTW, this thread will be moved to the "Book and Reference" section.

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2013 2:38 am
by paulcadogan
Well the evidence is there, plain as day, for all to see. Wow! In this day and age, that's absolutely shocking! :shock: :shock:

Are there not serious consequences for "indiscretions" such as this???

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2013 10:17 am
by Alberto Virtuani
Jose M. Rico wrote: "The text on this book contains a considerable number of excerpts and quotes that have been taken from kbismarck.com website........http://www.kbismarck.com/copy001.html"

:oops: :oops: :oops:

To paraphrase my favourite sentence of Adm.Cunningham, we could say that "it takes very few time to build a new book, it takes a whole life of researches and fairness to build a reputation". :lol:

Bye, Alberto

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2013 6:15 pm
by Antonio Bonomi
Hello everybody,

As José correctly wrote above we have been: PLAGIARIZED !
Our material being taken, copied and used with no authorization requested, no acknowledgement recognized.

In my case, the article I wrote on the Denmark Strait battle, published on Storia Militare on December 2005 has been just taken and a bit modified on the sentences to try to conceal any wrongdoing.

I left for kindness on the author's website my 2003 version of that article with my name on it as author. After 10 years, he just changed it with this modified version and removed my name taking it over. This is how it looked like until a few weeks ago:

http://web.archive.org/web/201302112238 ... attle.html

... and this is how the same page looks now:

http://www.bismarck-class.dk/bismarck/h ... attle.html

But, just to try to avoid this to happen again, and having been stolen of my works in the past on the same way, I put on the article a “Trojan Horse”. I changed intentionally the first name of Prinz Eugen Torpedo Officer, KapitanLeutenant Sigurd Reimann with an invented name by myself: Ernst !

I did this in order to be able, in case of a situation like this one occurred, to demonstrate without any doubts that the text was copied from my text as it is self evident on many other statements in that book.

The trick did work as thought (like the Scharnhorst Baltic camouflage in the past) as the invented name was copied into the book, and you can find the evidence on Jose's link above.

It is NOT the first time the same person does those things; it will probably NOT be the last time.

I suspect that these 2 other works I did and left there for the reader's convenience, like the 2003 DS battle text, will have same destiny in the near future.

http://www.scharnhorst-class.dk/scharnh ... njuno.html

http://www.scharnhorst-class.dk/scharnh ... front.html

You can read more about all this and previous occurrences on several other forums:

http://www.forum-marinearchiv.de/smf/in ... 625.0.html

http://www.forum-marinearchiv.de/smf/in ... 537.0.html


http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/vi ... 9&t=102717

http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/vi ... 9&t=119424

Therefore, I also find this misuse of my work to be deceptive, unethical, and not acceptable.

You are right Alberto: “It takes a whole life of researches and fairness to build a reputation“.

Bye Antonio :D

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Thu Dec 19, 2013 6:19 pm
by Benjamin
Wow! I had no idea. I'm appalled and don't know what to say. :shock:
I believe the author visited the wreck with James Cameron. Are there photos of the wreck's interior, like engine rooms, magazines, cabins, etc.? I missed interior images in Ballard's book.

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2013 7:48 pm
by Karol Rubik
I have this book. My first impression was ok, but I expected much more from a book long announced as a definitive work. It is not even close to that and after reading this forum thread I'm now even more disappointed. There are some photos of the Bismarck that were unknown to me, but other than that there really is not much new information and I now regret buying this book. It seems the author took a little from here and a little from there. For example, the seven frames on page 108 are from the book, Axis and Neutral Battleships by Garzke & Dulin, page 305-
This book is just not worth the price for me and my copy will probably end up on ebay soon.

+Benjamin The photos of the wreck are not good. They are too small and dark. You can find much better quality images and videos in the internet.

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2013 8:55 pm
by Paul L
Can stuff posted on the Internet be considered plagiarized if it is not copyrighted? My material from Tank Net has been copy and pasted ad-nauseum . I don't care too much.

You don't "own" anything you write on the internet- the information always came from some other sources. Now if those snippets of information are not well credited- that's another matter. However if you eliminated all books without notations -you'd eliminate 90% of the work out their.

Perhaps you should petition him to at least credit the material used?

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:41 am
by desertsailor1
I left a review on Amazon linking to the discussion here on kbismarck.org and suggested that buyers might want to beware. If you search Amazon using the author's name you will get to the book in question. A large number of comments left there will have some effect, I am sure. This kind of sleazy behavior simply cannot be tolerated.

charley
Desert Sailor

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 2:40 am
by Reishe
"You don't "own" anything you write on the internet- the information always came from some other sources."


Hi--

Please forgive me for jumping in here as a guest on your forum. This discussion was linked on a maritime history forum I follow. As I have to wrestle with copyright and permissions issues, I just wanted to respond to this particular point.

You DO own the content of your website. I would disagree that website content *always* comes from other sources--there are personal blogs, fiction and poetry sites, photo sites etc. all 100% filled with original content. There are web-only news sources whose reporters certainly research their stories using information available to them, but also do the legwork to support original reporting. As for researched content, as long as research is credited, why should an author not retain as much ownership as he/she would have if the same content were printed on paper?

In any case, regardless of the source of the information, your words are your own, and should be credited as such if borrowed. Even if a work is in public domain, lifting word-for-word text is plagiarism.

To quote LegalZoom: "All websites and their content are inherently copyrighted, provided they are original works. " [http://www.legalzoom.com/intellectual-p ... -copyright]. While it used to be the case that you had to register copyright to protect your work, now copyright is an automatic result of the act of creation. The fact that a huge swath of internet users ignore that fact and grab words and images willy-nilly without permission or accreditation doesn't make it right, or legal. The best example of this disconnect I've seen is the great "Honestly, Monica" story of 2010. [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/1 ... ringement/]

Re: Bismarck - Pride of the German Navy

Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 3:55 pm
by paulcadogan
desertsailor1 wrote:I left a review on Amazon linking to the discussion here on kbismarck.org and suggested that buyers might want to beware. If you search Amazon using the author's name you will get to the book in question. A large number of comments left there will have some effect, I am sure. This kind of sleazy behavior simply cannot be tolerated.
Hi Charley,

I looked on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, but there are no customer reviews posted yet. Are you sure your post went through?