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News stories from the book world in January 2006

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January 2006

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Into the digital age

30 January 2006

Digital rights and Internet developments look like being the hot issue of this year as they were in 2005. Representatives of UK publishers, the Society of Authors and authors' agents have been meeting to try to thrash out a common approach to the question.  Read more

What price truth over celebrity?

23 January 2006

News Review has taken the unusual step of reporting on the same story two weeks running because it appears that the general conclusion we reached last week was wrong. We concluded that James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces, 'first tried to market his memoir as fiction, so the publisher must have knowingly taken it on and suggested he should publish it as non-fiction, encou  Read more

Objective truth versus 'emotional truth'

16 January 2006

The astonishing story of James Frey seems like a fable for our times. His memoir of drug and alcohol abuse followed by redemption, A Million Little Pieces, was a smash hit in the US after he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show last October.  Read more

Freedom of speech on trial

9 January 2006

The trial of the distinguished Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has raised fundamental issues relating to writers' freedom of speech in a frightening instance of nationalism run riot and embodied in law. What Pamuk, internationally the best-known Turkish writer of his generation, has dared to do is to challenge the state through referring to a dark episode in Turkish history, which the governm  Read more

'More authors than nurses, soldiers and miners combined'

2 January 2006

As we enter 2006 we can look back on a real rollercoaster of a year in 2005. Trends in the book world include the relentless growth of the big companies in bookselling and publishing, with the ongoing threat to independent bookshops and to the continued independence of small publishers.  Read more