Property Rights

Photo: Michael Hale

"Three Canadian writers filed suit last week against Penguin Canada’s parent company, Pearson Canada, alleging that its newly published English-language edition of Gold Mountain Blues infringes their copyrights. Wayson Choy, Sky Lee and Paul Yee are suing for $6-million, saying [Ling] Zhang’s book contains numerous elements copied from their work, including characters, plots and descriptions. Their statement of claim, which contains allegations not proven in court, gives several examples of similarities, including the story of a disfigured railway worker who saves his foreman from death, which appears in Choy’s 1995 novel The Jade Peony; the story of a Chinese man rescued by a girl of Chinese-native heritage, which appears in Lee’s 1990 novel Disappearing Moon Cafe; and the story of a Chinese boy rescued from bullies by his white employer, which appears in Yee’s 2004 young-adult novel The Bone Collector’s Son. [...]
     'We want to see the evidence and we will apologize if we are wrong,' Choy says. 'We don’t like this ... I react with anger, but some of us have reacted with tears.' " — Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail
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Kept in the Dark

From: Fine Books & Collections

"Bram Stoker's private journal sat unnoticed on his great-grandson's bookshelf in England for at least a year.
     Full of notes that would inform his legendary novel Dracula and other stories, the thin, unmarked book had probably been lugged down from the attic at some point, along with other things the Stoker family had passed down for more than a century and placed inconspicuously in Noel Dobbs' Isle of Wight home.
     Then, one day not long ago, a researcher working on a project about Stoker got in touch with Dobbs to ask if he might know anything about a journal his famous relative kept. Dobbs looked around and finally popped open this tiny book. It was signed 'Abraham Stoker.' " — Ashley Fantz, CNN
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Ink on Paper under Pen

From: Fountain Pens

"Writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity, even for those who were once taught the rigorous rules of penmanship in grade school and hardly saw a day go by without jotting down a telephone number or a list of food items to buy at the market on the way home, and for that purpose carried with them something to write with and something to write on. In an emergency, lacking pen or notebook, they might even approach a complete stranger to ask for assistance. For instance, on a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil."
— Charles Simie, The New York Review of Books
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From: Princeton University Library - Sketch (1963) from the notebooks of the Argentine novelist and short story writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)

Spreading the Word One Pixel at a Time (Part Two)

"It’s official. Roald Dahl’s well-loved books and classic children’s tales—Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—are now part of the Worldreader collection and will be available to our kids.
     We've worked with Puffin, a division of Penguin Children’s Books in the U.K., to get these titles donated, giving Worldreader’s children and teachers free access to them. We’re thrilled to have Puffin join us in cultivating a culture of reading in the developing world. We can’t think of a better way get to kids to keep flipping virtual ink and fall into a good book."
—Worldreader

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Read more about Worldreader here...

Get all of Roald Dahl's (Puffin) books here...

Book Baksheesh?

Photo: Michael Hale

"Having already done three book-signing events at Saskatoon’s McNally Robinson bookstore in support of his regional bestseller, The Saskatchewan Book of Musts, author D. Grant Black balked when asked to pay a $25 fee prior to appearing at a fourth, pre-Christmas signing this month. [...]
     Although squeezed booksellers are under increasing pressure to 'make events revenue-bearing,' bookstore owner Paul McNally said in an interview, the $25 appearance fee is not a response. 'It’s not a fee,' he explained, rather a share of the costs involved in promoting events. 'And we’ve been doing it for a million years.'
     Other booksellers expressed surprise at the practice. Chapters/Indigo stores 'encourage author participation wholeheartedly,' company spokeswoman Janet Eger said in an e-mail, 'and do not charge publicity fees to host.' "— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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World Fantasy Award 2011

"Nigerian-American novelist Nnedi Okorafor has beaten a host of big names to win the World Fantasy award for her novel set in a post-apocalyptic Saharan Africa.
     Who Fears Death is the story of Onyesonwu – her name means 'who fears death' in Igbo – a woman with great magical powers who was conceived when her mother was raped during a battle. It beat South African novelist Lauren Beukes's Arthur C Clarke award-winning Zoo City, acclaimed Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven and many-time British Fantasy award winner Graham Joyce's new novel The Silent Land to win the best novel award, judged by five authors and editors from the science fiction and fantasy genre." — Alison Flood, Guardian
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Read more about all the nominees here...
Buy Who Fears Death here...

Books in a Bind

"Kobo's decision to enter into competition with its own suppliers further complicates relations already strained by the decision of its part-owner, Indigo Books and Music, to promote Kobo e-readers aggressively in stores formerly dedicated exclusively to selling traditional books.
     Thousands of bookstores across North America have closed in the course of the digital revolution, falling prey first to online book sales and more recently to e-books that can be delivered automatically to such devices as the Kobo and Amazon’s market-leading Kindle. Some fear that traditional publishers will be the next to suffer as online operators move onto their turf.
     But Writers’ Union of Canada chair Greg Hollingshead welcomed the news, saying the new competition could encourage traditional publishers to pay more for electronic rights and to stop forcing authors to do 'what publishers are supposed to do – editing and promotion.'
     Traditional publishers generally remit 25 per cent of a book’s cover price as a royalty to authors, while Amazon pays as much as 70 per cent, according to Hollingshead. If the new e-publishers make good on their promise, he added, 'conventional publishers will need to look hard at how they treat authors and how they compete in the digital market.' " — John Barber, THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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Read more about Kobo here...