Category: publishing

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ publishers released the Nobel laureate’s new book early when pirates began selling stolen copies of it. “Vendors were tapping on car windows, offering the long-awaited novel at half the official price.” But it appears that Garcia Marquez changed the last chapter for the official version and that the pirated version is wrong.

Nobel Prize author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s first book in a decade went on sale in Latin America Wednesday (released early because pirated copies were being sold on the streets) and the interest has been intense. “Editors said demand for the book has been so strong that they were already in the process of publishing a second edition of 50,000 to add to the initial Mexican release of 100,000 in softcover and 30,000 in hardcover.”

What is it like to be a judge for a prize like the Booker? “Reading 132 books in 147 days is like taking a course in kick-boxing; you quickly lose any flabby concentration and wishy-washy standards, becoming fitter and leaner and more demanding. In the process, you learn a great deal about why so many novels—even well written, carefully crafted novels as so many of those submitted were—are ultimately pointless.”

Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize win earlier this week was announced in much of the British press as a victory by a “gay” novel. But it’s much more than that. “I only chafe at the ‘gay writer’ tag if it’s thought to be what is most or only interesting about what I’m writing. I want it to be part of the foundation of the books, which are actually about all sorts of other things as well – history, class, culture. There’s all sorts of stuff going on. It’s not just, as you would think if you read the headlines in the newspapers, about gay sex.”

There is a myth that books that win the Booker Prize end up selling a lot of copies. But a look at previous winners’ sales shows that isn’t always the case. “Due to the scale of the Booker award any book that wins, whatever your reason for buying it, will be the sort of title that will become a library staple in many people’s homes and will continue to sell across the decades. The surprise this list throws up is how some books you may not have expected are stronger sellers than some of the bigger names further down the list.”

A dispute about the “modernizing” of the English PEN writers’ organization threatens to bring down the group. “Suspicion, distrust, backbiting, smear tactics, simple loathing and sometimes extremely unliterary abuse have come to characterise a struggle that has been waged until now behind the closed doors of London’s literary salons.”

Jon Stewart’s “America” is the best-selling book in the country right now, but Wal-Mart has “canceled its order for the book after learning that page 99 features a doctored photo of nine naked bodies with the heads of the Supreme Court justices attached.”

Radovan Karadzic is on the run, a $5 million bounty on his head, and facing charges of genocide in Bosnia at The Hague’s war crimes tribunal. But that hasn’t stopped him from writing and publishing a book. “The strong autobiographical element is a reminder of a man with a large ego and a small sense of responsibility. It is scandalous that he should have had the leisure to write anything but a confession. The fact that he has been able to publish a book does not inspire confidence that Nato and the Bosnian Serb police are doing enough to harass him and his network of loyal supporters so he can be brought to justice.”

Book borrowing from public libraries in the UK is down dramatically, says a new report. “These figures mean that book issues have fallen by on average 31% in Britain since 1995. In England the fall since 1995 was 33% , in Wales 38%, in Scotland 32% and in Northern Ireland 28%.”

It’s taken Gabriel García Márquez a decade to get his new book ready for publication. Now the publication date is being moved up by the book’s publishers to combat pirates who are getting their own version out. “In a full-page advertisement in Colombia’s leading newspaper on Saturday, the publishers announced the early launch and denounced the pirated versions being peddled on the streets of the Colombian capital as ‘mutilating the content of the work’.”