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A tsunami hits the book world

16 April 2012

At the beginning of the week it looked like the London Book Fair would be the story of the week. But by mid-week a tsunami had swept through the book world and there was only one story dominating the headlines.   Read more

Stunning news on Google Settlement

28 March 2011

Some weeks there's just too much news for us to cover in a short column and this is one of those weeks, so for now the latest moves in the ongoing Google Settlement saga (see News Review 27 April 2009 and 16 November 2009) have to take precedence.  Read more

Seierstad to pay punitive damages

23 August 2010

Åsne Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has been ordered to pay more than £26,000 in punitive damages. As Conor Foley in the Guardian put it, this news will be greeted 'as either a blow to artistic freedom of expression or a victory for the world's misrepresented and powerless poor.  Read more

J K Rowling defends plagiarism charge

22 February 2010

The estate of Adrian Jacobs, author of Willy the Wizard, has now widened its claim against Bloomsbury for plagiarism in the Harry Potter books to include J K Rowling herself, previously thought to be protected by a statute of limitations.  Read more

So what's the Google Settlement all about?

23 November 2009

You may be thoroughly bored with the Google Settlement (see last week's News Review) but it has a significant impact on authors' rights so it's worth making the effort to understand what it's all about.   Read more

Google Settlement agreed

16 November 2009

The New Google Settlement (see News Review 7 September) looks like a reasonable resolution of a thorny set of problems. Bowing to pressure from foreign governments and the US Department of Justice, the revised Settlement presented to the district Court in New York shortly before midnight on Friday limits the scope of the scheme to works registered with   Read more

The tragic saga of a bestselling author

9 November 2009

Stieg Larsson has been continually in the news ever since publication of his first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The third part of the Milennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has recently been published in the UK and the US.   Read more

Google goes for broke

7 September 2009

After a slow start, objectors have finally been getting their arguments against Google's plans in before the closing date of last Friday, 4 September.   Read more

Salinger sues to protect his copyright

8 June 2009

J D Salinger is suing the pseudonymous author who is planning shortly to publish a sequel Salinger's famous novel Catcher in the Rye presents what looks like a strong case of invasion of copyright.   Read more

Google grabs rights to digitised books

27 April 2009

Google's recent class action settlement in the US will award sweeping rights to manage and sell digitised versions of every work published or made available in the US. The settlement allows Google - which has already digitised more than seven million books - the non-exclusive right to digitise every book published before 5th January this year.  Read more

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3 May 2021 - What's new

May 2021
  • ‘When I was a child I was given a special book just to write stories because my handwriting and spelling were so bad. Suddenly I realised I wasn't hopeless at English. You forget children are always comparing each other, and if it's always about grammar and spelling, and if they don't get it, their self-esteem plummets.
  Read more

‘People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.'

— C. JoyBell C.

'The Lost Generation'

3 May 2021

‘When I was a child I was given a special book just to write stories because my handwriting and spelling were so bad. Suddenly I realised I wasn't hopeless at English. You forget children are always comparing each other, and if it's always about grammar and spelling , and if they don't get it, their self-esteem plummets.  Read more