Category: publishing

“The blurb is a longstanding practice in publishing — nowadays, it’s jarring to find a book that isn’t garnished with adoring verbiage. While there’s no empirical proof that blurbs help sell books, no publisher would dare print a book without one.”

What exactly is this “Alloy Entertainment”, the book packager responsible for the now infamous Kaavya Viswanathan book now withdrawn for plagiarism? “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.”

Waterstone’s founder Tim Waterstone has withdrawn his bid to buy back the bookseller from HMV. “Mr Waterstone, who founded the business almost 25 years ago, claimed HMV had imposed ‘ludicrous’ conditions for the deal, leaving him and his backers, Lazard European Private Equity Partners, with no alternative but to withdraw.”

More plagiarism charges have been made against Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” At least three passages “bear striking similarities to writing in ‘Can You Keep a Secret?,’ a chick-lit novel by Sophie Kinsella. The copying from Ms. Kinsella’s book does not seem to be as extensive as Ms. Viswanathan’s borrowing from two novels by Megan McCafferty, ‘Sloppy Firsts’ and ‘Second Helpings,’ both published by Crown, a division of Random House. In that case, Crown contends that more than 40 passages were copied from Ms. McCafferty’s books.”

Philip Roth, whose many novels include “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “The Plot Against America,” has received the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement, a prize worth $20,000.

Mumbai, India has a thriving street book-selling business. Or rather, had one. “Most of Mumbai’s pavement booksellers on Veer Nariman Road between Churchgate Station and Marine Drive are now an endangered species. A municipal clean-up is getting rid of hawkers in a city-wide drive to make Mumbai more like modernising Shanghai. Last summer, the city’s municipal agency evicted more than 50 of the roughly 75 pavement booksellers and carted away more than a dozen truckloads of books.”

“According to a a survey, parents start out reading to small children but abandon it as they grow up, to the point where just 3% of children aged 12 say they are read to every day.”

“What is new is the way the packaging operations dovetail so neatly with the values of the sprawling corporations that now control the publication of most books in America. It can come as no shock to anyone that they believe in marketing and the bottom line over and above everything else. When it comes to books for young readers, the result — in the overwhelming majority of cases — is a focus-group-driven literature of solipsism, which most children and adolescents ignore as bleak and inauthentic, despite all its calculated relevance.”

“Roth is more measured than he once was, when notoriety and controversy seemed to dog his every move. In 1959 — before his career had even had a chance to get started — his short story “Defender of the Faith” ignited a firestorm over what Jewish writers should and shouldn’t reveal about their culture… To see Roth now, though — contemplative, elegant, almost professorial, wearing a black V-neck sweater, blue pants and worn brown walking boots, thinning hair brushed back from his prominent forehead — is to recognize just how long ago that was.”

“The most prestigious prize-giving culture in Britain still often shows itself weirdly unable to recognise and reward the greatest writing, and for some reason books by women are still often the ones that lose out. When Zadie Smith’s ferocious and heartfelt novel On Beauty lost out in the Booker race last year to John Banville’s desiccated The Sea, it was only what one has come to expect from the Booker prize.”