By Andrew Wilkins The Popular Penguins follow Allen Lane’s ethos of making great writing affordable and available to everybody — now you can own a piece of the Penguin story. — marketing blurb from Penguin Web site If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. — Sir Isaac Newton MELBOURNE: You may [...]
By Andrew Wilkins CANBERRA: Today, an intense year-long debate about the future of Australia’s publishing industry effectively came to an end with the announcement that the Australian government had rejected a proposal from its own think-tank to turn Australian into an open market for books. ”The Government has decided not to change the Australian regulatory regime for [...]
By Andrew Wilkins When I bought the English language rights to a beautiful children’s picture book, The Red Piano, from French publisher Editions du Sorbier earlier this year, I wasn’t really thinking I would have censorship problems. While the book is a fictional retelling of a real episode from China’s Cultural Revolution, the author is Canadian, the [...]
By Andrew Wilkins Pearson is the largest conglomerate in publishing, with a turnover of over five billion euros, and all but three of the top 10 publishing businesses are European, according to the recently released 2009 Global Ranking of World Publishing, which lists and assesses the world’s top 52 publishing conglomerates. Now in its third year, the [...]
By Andrew Wilkins Frankfurt’s enduring relevance as an international rights fair is built to a great extent on the principle of territorial copyright—that invisible patchwork of rights territories that covers the globe. But what if there was no territorial copyright to enable publishers to safely invest in intellectual property in their own country, safe in the knowledge [...]
By Andrew Wilkins While hardcore digitizers were immersed in the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference at the Radisson Hotel, back at the fair grounds rights managers were congregating to discuss the practicalities of making money from digital content. This year’s International Rights Directors Meeting—the 23rd—was appropriately themed, “Hitting a Moving Target,” and captured the sheer speed [...]
Editorial by Andrew Wilkins MELBOURNE: Australia is a nation of booklovers, but you won’t find many fans for a new Australian paperback, ISBN 9781740372817. In fact, there’s an argument for saying it’s “Australia’s Most Hated Book.” That’s because it’s a report by an Australian Government think-tank, the Productivity Commission, which recommends (among other things) the abolition of [...]
By Andrew Wilkins There is no time frame set for the proposals made by the Australian Productivity Commission to alter copyright protections, as outlined in our lead article, to become law. The next step is for Australia’s Assistant Treasurer to consider the proposal, which he’s indicated he’s in no hurry to do. The ruling Australian Labour [...]
By Andrew Wilkins NUKU’ALOFA. TONGA: With an economy based on farming, fishing and some tourism, there’s not a huge demand for consumer books in Tonga, although the country has the highest literacy rate in the Pacific (over 98%) and a good primary and secondary education system. Still, it’s enough to support a handful of small publishers [...]
By Chip Rossetti In the fall of 2004, I was an editor at a New York publishing house, [...]
• Cognito Comics is launching an immersive digital graphic novel called Operation Ajax, [...]
