Category: publishing

Sales of audiobooks were up four percent in 2004. “The major trend emerging from the survey showed higher revenue from new audio formats and the continued slow fade of the traditional audio cassette. MP3 CDs represented 1 percent of sales and digital downloads represented 6 percent of sales in 2004.”

As the copyright infringement case against DaVinci Code author Dan Brown continues in London, it has become clear that Brown’s defense team plans to argue that the ideas the plaintiffs claim were stolen from them are so general that their use does not constitute a violation. Brown does acknowledge that he added some elements to the novel after reading The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail, but says that the ideas were not original to that book’s authors anyway.

The New York Public Library has purchased an extensive personal archive by the author William S. Burroughs. Burroughs is best known for the controversial novel, Naked Lunch, which was at the center of a landmark court case on censorship in the 1960s. The archive, which includes 11,000 pages of written material, will join Jack Kerouac’s papers in the library’s collection, making it “perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats.”

Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers have published a statement in a French paper warning of Islamic totalitarianism. “The writers say the violence sparked by the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad shows the need to fight for secular values and freedom.”

A survey of librarians to mark World Book Day has voted “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee as the “book adults should read before they die.” They “came out in favour of The Bible in second place and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in third place. But international best-seller The Da Vinci Code only gained one nomination.”

Authors including Will Self, Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby, JM Coetzee and Mike Leigh are protesting against the organizer of the London Book Fair. The authors are complaining that the producer also organised Europe’s biggest arms fair in London last year.

Joseph Epstein discovers someone has plagiarized his work. That gets him to thinking: “I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism–of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.”

As opening arguments were heard Monday in the DaVinci Code copyright infringement case in London, the web of plots and subplots had become so tangled as to nearly approximate the book at the center of the storm. But while the details may be confusing, what is at stake in the case is abundantly clear. DaVinci is the greatest money-making machine the publishing world has at the moment, and if it is found to have been illegally cribbed from the work of others, the whole synergistic apparatus could come crashing down.

The enigmatic political magazine everyone loves to hate has a new editor, and for once, the transition seems as if it will be an easy one. The New Republic, which has regularly drawn the ire of partisans on both side of the American political divide, named Franklin Foer as its newest editor-in-chief, succeeding Peter Beinart, who is stepping down of his own volition.

“Why all the fuss about Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s “discovery” that the Davenant bust in the Garrick club matches the Darmstadt death mask in Germany and must, therefore, be a true representation of Shakespeare’s physiognomy? Since the provenance of both artefacts depends on the size of a growth on Sheakespeare’s forehead, some people will argue that the revelation ought to be of interest only to a pathologist. And they would be right. What Shakespeare looked like is of no consequence. All that matters is the text and how the author intended it to be interpreted.”