Category: publishing

“On Monday, the High Court in London will hear a lawsuit which will either make publishing history or be dismissed as a storm in a teacup. The reason for the fuss is that it relates to one of the most successful novels of modern times and the lifting of “the whole architecture” of a body of research, a largely intangible entity which, not without reason, has caused paranoia throughout the literary world. Plagiarism is not a grounds for litigation in the UK, so instead the plaintiffs are alleging copyright infringement, which, of course, amounts to much the same thing. What makes the situation all the more titillating, and bizarre, however, is that they are suing their own publisher.”

A court ruling last week might undermine Google’s case to be able to digitize books. The judge said “Google’s use of thumbnail-sized reproductions in its image search program violated the copyright of Perfect 10, a publisher of X-rated magazines and Web sites, because it undermined that company’s ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users.”

Dan Brown, whose “Da Vinci Code” has become the bestselling hardback adult novel of all time, has been accused of stealing his plot for the book from a non-fiction work called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. If they win, the plaintiffs “will seek an injunction preventing further infringement of their copyright. In theory, this could bar Random House from publishing Brown’s book, which has sold more than 40 million copies, and even threaten the British release of the £53m film adaptation, starring Tom Hanks.”

At 49, Lise Ravary is sitting on top of Canada’s ever-expanding world of magazines, and she thrives on a synthesis of serious journalism and celeb-soaked pop culture that publishers can’t get enough of. “Arguably, Ravary is the most pivotal force in Canadian consumer publishing today. And in both official languages — probably no one else more closely experiences this country’s two cultures of magazine journalism.”

So Google has these big book digitization projects going. The project seems to violate copyrights. So what’s the point? “Some in the industry wonder whether Google’s long-term aim isn’t to set itself up as a sort of instant publisher; that once it has all those books in its index, it could generate a print-on-demand shop that would bypass publishers, shipping a book to you even though it is officially out of print.”

First James Frey’s agent dropped him. Now his publisher has backed out of the rest of its multi-book deal. “A publishing source told PAGE SIX’s Jared Paul Stern that Riverhead decided the author was too much of a liability and has just nixed the deal after much discussion. ‘That is correct, and we have no comment,’ Frey’s rep says.

The vatican wants publishers to pay royalties on the Pope’s writing. “The demand by the Vatican to respect copyright on the pontiff’s writings and pay for their use has triggered hot debate: Should an institution which exists to spread the word of God be putting a price on papal writ? Unthinkable, say some authors. Not so, counters the Vatican; the authors are being paid for their efforts, so why not the church?”

E.L. Doctorow has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner Foundation fiction award for his novel “The March.” “It is the second PEN/Faulkner award for the much-honored Doctorow, who won in 1990 for “Billy Bathgate” and whose 1975 novel “Ragtime” established him as a writer capable of combining literary ambition and commercial success.”

The big thing in romance novels these days? Not so much with the wooing and courtship. What do readers want? Erotica, and today’s romance novels are spicing it up as the genre grows by double digits. “Publishing goes in cycles. Erotica now seems to be the new hot thing.”

Stephen Watson, a poet and the head of the University of Cape Town’s English department has accused Antjie Krog, the Afrikaner author of Country of My Skull, of “lifting material from a range of writers, including the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes and two 19th-century European linguists. He said Country of My Skull, an award-winning account of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was recently turned into a Hollywood film, used words and phrases from Hughes’s 1976 essay Myth and Education.”