Category: publishing

Publisher Little, Brown has taken the unusual step of withdrawing a book – a history of the creation of the atomic bomb, after four wurthors complained that the book contained passages drawn from their work, uncredited.The author, Brian VanDeMark, 42, said yesterday that he had no comment. In a telephone interview on Friday he said that he was confident that ‘detached readers would find a majority’ of the passages in question to be ‘reasonable paraphrases.’ But he added then that “a minority should and will be reworded or credited in a footnote.”

A longshot has won this year’s Orange Fiction Prize. “What was billed as a race between two million-selling authors, the American Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith from England, went instead to the relatively little-known Valerie Martin for Property, a novel of exceptional power about slavery in 19th century Louisiana.”

When it was pointed out to Stephen Howarth that portions of his much-lauded 1988 biography of Admiral Horatio Nelson appeared to have made their way, slightly paraphrased, into a Booker-winning novel published in 1999 by Barry Unsworth, Howarth was understandably upset. But is the use of historical fact in a work of fiction really plagiarism, even if the wording is similar to an excerpt of a previously published work? Unsworth and his publisher think not, and while Unsworth has expressed regret over the incident, he has also suggested to Howarth that “to have exerted an influence on another writer must after all be a source of gratification.” Howarth is not in the least gratified.

Sales of 100 favorite books chosen by the BBC in its Big Read program have soared, as people check out what’s on the list. Bookseller “WH Smith, however, has taken a different tack. It has launched a set of ‘Little Reads’, flimsy little paperbacks priced at £1 apiece, reprinting just the first chapter of a book from the Big Read 100 as a ‘sampler’.” David Sexton writes that it’s a “potty” idea.

The publisher Scholastic is laying off 400 employees on the eve of publishing the new Harry Potter. “Scholastic has been steadily tightening its financial belt since the beginning of the calendar year, following a terrible January when sales were particularly weak in the company’s trade and school book club divisions. In March, it announced for the second time in two months that sales and earnings in fiscal 2003 would not meet expectations. Scholastic has been hurt by the sluggish general economy and state budget pressures that have cut back school and library funding.”

The publisher Scholastic is laying off 400 employees on the eve of publishing the new Harry Potter. “Scholastic has been steadily tightening its financial belt since the beginning of the calendar year, following a terrible January when sales were particularly weak in the company’s trade and school book club divisions. In March, it announced for the second time in two months that sales and earnings in fiscal 2003 would not meet expectations. Scholastic has been hurt by the sluggish general economy and state budget pressures that have cut back school and library funding.”

“During this year’s four-day BookExpo America, which ended Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center, the hunt was on for the next ‘The Lovely Bones,’ the debut novel and publishing sensation by Long Beach writer Alice Sebold, who was a breakout star at last year’s BookExpo in New York. In Los Angeles, the gathering drew more than 25,000 booksellers, librarians, publishers and others who traded the latest industry news (John Grisham’s next novel, about a high school football team in Texas, is due in September) and gathered up the giveaways. (Only supremely disciplined book lovers kept walking past the stacks of free books cluttering the aisles.) Part of the fun was to pluck a jewel from the 20,000 titles being unveiled.”

“When the enemy of literacy is imagined to be television or comic books, one can rightfully feel impatient with the kind of pro-book aphorism found on a tasseled bookmark. But what if the enemy is fire, or incendiary shells, or Nazism?  In ‘Library: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles shows that the history of libraries is the history of the destruction of books.”

A Canadian publishing house has announced that it will stop publishing the names of translators on the cover of books that were originally published in French. The reason is reportedly that consumers tend to be wary of translated books, and House of Anansi Press is hoping to attract new readership. Translators, who fought long and hard to get their names on book covers back in the 1970s, are understandably upset.

The blogging phenomenon continues to expand worldwide, and new reports out of the Middle East indicate that Iran, a theocracy with no free press, has become a blogging hotbed. One leader of the movement predicts that “until there is a free press in Iran again, weblogs will flourish. In the last few years about 90 (pro-democracy) newspapers in Iran have been shut down. So people have turned to the Internet to get news.”