By Edward Nawotka This week at Publishing Perspectives we were hot on the trail of a number of developing stories; including J.D. Salinger’s lawsuit against his nemesis Fredrik Colting and artist Ai Weiwei’s call to boycott the internet in protest of China’s Green Dam computer filtering software (It worked! – see Bonus Material below). We also offered Ghanaian-American novelist Kwei …
Iraqi, Egyptian Publishers Enthuse Over New CEO Training Program
By Chip Rossetti ABU DHABI: KITAB, the joint venture of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage and the Frankfurt Book Fair, recently held the first of two five-day CEO-level training programs it has organized this year for publishers from the Arab world. Nineteen publishers from eight Arab countries attended a series of workshops in Abu Dhabi from June …
Will 360 Million Chinese Boycott the Internet?
By Edward Nawotka BEIJING: Today is the day China turned off the internet. Or at least that is the hope of artist Ai Weiwei. Weiwei called on China’s 360 million internet users to “stop working, reading, chatting, blogging, gaming and mailing” to protest the Chinese government’s demand that computers users have to have installed its controversial Green Dam Youth Escort …
Weekly Recap: Losing Dust Jackets, Africa’s “It” Girl, PubMatch and Granta Go Global
By Edward Nawotka (read the Arabic version here) (read the Chinese version here) This past week in Publishing Perspectives we covered paper-over-board printing, spoke with Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, looked at PubMatch.org and considered the international expansion of Granta literary magazine. Next week, we’ll start with a consideration of the legal ramifications of J.D. Salinger lawsuit against Nicotext, as well …
PubMatch Promises Year-Round Online International Book Fair
By Edward Nawotka NEW YORK: “We were at the Beijing Book Fair last year in a meeting with Chinese, US and UK publishers and the question that most often came up was who do we deal with, which department and which division do we deal with,” says Jon Malinowski, president of the Combined Book Exhibit, a company that displays US …
Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Straddling Continents
By Edward Nawotka TORONTO: “In the West we have constructed a narrative where African wars and poverty are meaningless, with no real political or historical context, which suggests misery is this atavistic thing,” says Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. “But what gets forgotten is at the same time all this is happening, people are falling in love, people are still …
In Praise of Paper-Over-Board
By Chad W. Post ROCHESTER, NEW YORK (USA): I have a visceral hatred for dust jackets – I strip them off, I crinkle them, I lose them. So in 2007, when in the process of launching Open Letter (a new publishing house at the University of Rochester dedicated to international literature), we had to decide whether we wanted to do …
Weekly Recap: Mexican Mayhem, Cape Town’s Book Fair, Egyptian E-books
By Edward Nawotka This week Publishing Perspectives looked at a scary situation for an author in Mexico, considered the state of affairs at the Cape Town Book Fair, was impressed with the business plan of Berlin’s TXTR, and considered how Arabic language e-books break down borders. Next week, look for a paean to paper-over-board printing, a talk with Nigerian author …
Kotobarabia’s Arabic E-Books Extend Borders
By Chip Rossetti CAIRO: Most of the difficulties faced by Arabic-language book publishing stem from two basic problems: government censorship and very limited distribution. But with e-books, Ramy Habeeb, founder of the Egypt-based publisher Kotobarabia, has managed to bypass both seemingly intractable problems. As the first e-publisher devoted exclusively to Arabic-language titles, www.kotobarabia.com now offers over 8500 books in 31 …
Berlin’s TXTR Aims to Fight the E-Powers That Be
Berlin-based e-book platform and e-reader txtr will launch in Germany at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009.