Katie vs Katie

Some days back, there’s been some legal tussle between Katie Jones, owner of the domain Katie.com, and an alleged lawyer from Plume Books, publisher of a book also called Katie.com. The book was a harrowing portrayal of a 13-year-old girl’s brush with a pedophile online, while the domain is something totally unrelated to the book. The supposed lawyer called domain owner Katie Jones in an attempt to get back repossess the domain in favor of Plume Books.

Boingboing.net points to some recent developments that has Plume Books and the book’s author Katie Tarbox disavowing that they had anything to do with Ms Jones’ harassment. To keep the peace, so to speak, and to prevent any more tussles about the ownership of the domain, the publisher has decided to retitle the book into “A Girl’s Life Online,” which is “an important book about predatory pedophiles on the Internet and how we can protect our children. [Plume] changed the title to keep focus on this issue. The newly titled book will be released next month. [We] have always taken this situation very seriously. And we hope that by making this title change, it will demonstrate just how dedicated Plume is to clarifying this matter.”

It’s an unbearably boring title if you ask me, but does well to serve what the book is all about. I’ve picked up a copy of this book last year in a Booksale bin, and the girl Katie lived in a very upscale neighborhood where the girls problematized what to wear during the school year, because you can never repeat the same outfit twice. You have to decide whether to go Gap or Ralph Lauren, and when Katie hooked up with a guy on the net and set up a meeting with him during an out of town field trip, I was going "Girl, that was really so stupid of you." But hey, girl was thirteen, and more than anything, it was more about how difficult it was to be that age and try to be accepted by your peers that you'll grab at any form of attention, no matter if it was some perv masquerading as your friend.

So if you see a copy of it lying around, you might want to pick it up and check it out before the retitled version comes out. But I’m warning you though that if you have very low tolerance for Elle Woods and Cher from Clueless type girls, stay away.