Category: publishing

A novel by a Harvard student has been withdrawn from publication by the book’s publisher. Michael Pietsch, the firm’s publisher, said in a brief statement that bookstores would be asked to stop selling “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” and return any remaining copies to the publisher. He said the book’s author, Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, had agreed to the withdrawal.

Who uses Pittsburgh’s libraries? Kids. According to a new study, the city’s Carnegie Library is a hit. “A magnet for teenagers and 20-somethings, the library rivals a shopping mall with its assortment of books, videos, DVDs and Internet access. The former bastion of the bookish, the library draws more crowds than the region’s sports teams.”

“For a quarter century, its jaunty pages have enlivened the idyllic campus in Hanover, N.H., challenging liberal presuppositions — sometimes raucously — while earning recognition as a model for conservative newspapers nationwide. Distributed door to door to every student and mailed to subscribers across the country, the Review has been at the center of stormy cultural and political debates since its inception.”

Apparently, the pull of The DaVinci Code is so strong that not even members of the bench can resist it. The judge in the now-dismissed plagiarism case against author Dan Brown has admitted that he embedded a code of his own within the text of his 72-page ruling, and says he will confirm its contents once someone breaks the code.

The Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case has brought to light a profession many outside the publishing world have probably been completely unaware of: that of the “book packager.” Alongside Viswanathan’s name (and those of countless other authors) on the copyright page is the name “Alloy Entertainment,” which specializes in coming up with ideas, characters, and plotlines that test well with a certain demographic of readers, then hiring an author to flesh out the details.

Kaavya Viswanathan continues to insist that she never intentionally copied passages of her novel from two books by Megan McCafferty, and said in an appearance on NBC’s Today Show that her love for McCafferty’s works must have led her to unconsciously paraphrase the author’s words. Meanwhile, lawyers from Viswanathan and McCafferty’s respective publishers are discussing the potential implications of the plagiarism, even as Viswanathan’s publisher says that it has no intention of withdrawing the book.

Ottakar’s is a quirky and offbeat chain of UK bookshops beloved by its clientele. “Writers, publishers and readers have been in a state of high anxiety since last autumn when it was first mooted that HMV (which owns Waterstone’s) wanted to take over Ottakar’s for some £97 million.”

The Harvard student-turned-author who confessed yesterday to “accidentally” plagiarizing parts of her first novel, has now been blasted by the publisher of the book she copied from. “In a statement issued today, [a senior VP of Crown Publishing] said that, ‘based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act.” The executive, Steve Ross, also says that there are more than 40 apparently lifted passages in Viswanathan’s novel, and calls the situation “nothing less than an act of literary identity theft.”

Alex Beam isn’t cutting Kaavya Viswanathan any slack for her alleged plagiarism, and points out that she didn’t exactly “write” her own novel in the traditional sense, anyway. “[She] bought her way into Harvard — her parents paid $10,000 to $20,000 to IvyWise, a college counseling service, according to The New York Times — then lucked her way into a $500,000 two-book contract with Little, Brown & Co. She shares the valuable copyright on her first novel with ‘book packager’ Alloy Entertainment, which helped flesh out the novel’s concept.” Beam wonders whether Viswanathan will be able to slough off the blame for the copying on some anonymous Alloy staffer.

American author Nicole Krauss, first-time Australian novelist Carrie Tiffany, and UK writers Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, and Ali Smith have been named as the finalists for Britain’s Orange Prize for Fiction. The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced in early June.