Category: words

Canadian inquiry into mega-store bookseller practices hears plenty of complaints from publishers but few specifics. – CBC

Why do authors on book tours skip going to Philadelphia? – Philadelphia Inquirer

— has sold 4 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. Steven Spielberg is set to direct the movie version of the book. But Mineko Iwasaki, the source for much of the material in the books is unhappy. “Basically, what is written in Arthur Golden’s book is false,” says the retired geisha, in her first interview since the book was published in Japanese in November and she was able to read it. “He got it wrong.” – Washington Post

— into the business practices of giant bookseller Chapters hears charges of “bullying tactics” used against independent booksellers. – CBC

In a pickup truck or car she wanders southern Africa, the lands south of the Zambezi River – Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola, Lesotho, Swaziland and, of course, South Africa. She buys books at each stop with cash or through barter, books that are indigenous to the land she’s in, and then sells them to customers throughout the world. Her clientele includes collectors and governments and universities. “I have standing orders from a number of American universities,” she said. “Yale says it will buy everything it can get that is published in Mozambique and Namibia.” – New York Times

David Talbot’s Salon Magazine gave a first-class coming-out party last week to celebrate their arrival in the capital. The dynamic: out-of-towner meets the locals and each sizes up the other. “It was, as the organizers had intended, as if an issue of Salon had jumped off the web and the bylines had leapt to life. More heat than light, but provoking an intensity of concentration among the audience unusual in a capital more accustomed to droning speakers and one-sided think-tank snooze-fests familiar to the C-Span viewing public.” – The Idler

• “David Talbot loves to tout Salon as cutting-edge, risk-taking, and irreverent,” writes Baltimore’s City Paper, “but the panel discussion he hosted that evening was nothing more than four self-promoting pundits (Arianna Huffington, David Horowitz, Joe Conason, and Stanley Crouch) trotting out what sounded like outtakes from Crossfire.” – Baltimore City Paper

The Turkish government confiscated all available copies of Jonathan Ames’ novel The Extra Man last week, and will try both his translator, Fatih Ozguven, and his publisher in Istanbul, Iletisim, on charges that the book is “corrupt and harmful to the morality of Turkish readers,” according to a fax Ames’ international rights agent Rosalie Siegel received from Istanbul. The book had been out a few months, and had been submitted to government censors for approval before publishing, as is required in Turkey. – New York Press