Reed Elsevier finally begins the bidding for the right to buy Reed Business Information (parent company of Publishers Weekly, Variety and many other publications) and, reports the Telegraph, up to a dozen offers have come in for the first round. Most of those believed to be vying for the whole division or for parts of RBI are private equity firms like TPG and DLJ Merchant Banking, Cinven and Candover, Bain, Apollo Management and Providence Equity Partners, while McGraw-Hill has teamed up with Advent and Quadrangle for a joint bid. The WSJ says that with “many of the 12 or so […]
Kafka's Estate, Possible Pornography in the News
The recent death of Esther Hoffe, secretary to the man who famously defied Franz Kafka’s wish for his papers to be burned, has put the estate in question – and in the news again. As her mother did, reports the NYT, Hava Hoffe is keeping scholars and archivists up at night wondering about the condition of what they believe are letters, diaries, photographs and perhaps unpublished works of Kafka and Brod. “This material belongs in Jerusalem,” argued Mark Gelber, a Kafka scholar and a professor of comparative literature at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba. “Brod became a Zionist before the […]
Gossip Girl DVD Features Audiobook Tie-in
Even though the success of the TV version of Gossip Girl has, more or less, given the backlist of Cecily von Ziegesar’s series a healthy sales uptick, the same cannot be said for the audiobooks, with “consistently moribund” sales of less than 1,000 yearly according to BookScan. “The teen and the late-teen market has been a really tough market for us,” said Anthony Goff, publisher of Hachette Audio and Digital Media. So Hachette has teamed up with Warner Video and those who buy the first season of the show on DVD will also get the audiobook of book one, narrated […]
Tintin Translation Pulled in Spain
A Spanish translation of one of Tintin’s most famous tales, The Blue Lotus, by Antonio Altarriba has been withdrawn from bookshops after pressure from Hergé’s estate. Arriba had updated the comic to show Tintin in his 30s and having something of a midlife crisis, with plenty of graphic sex scenes. The estate claimed the Altarriba version of this particular tale, which was published to cash in on last year’s 100th anniversary of Remi’s birth, “perverted the essence of the personality” of Tintin, putting pressure on the publishers of The Pink Lotus, Edicions de Ponent, and its distributors to ensure it […]
Vietnam Has Translation Woes, Too
The dearth of translated works is not just an American problem. Thanh Nien News profiles 28-year-old Cao Viet Dung, a “prolific” translator of works by Milan Kundera, Thomas Friedman, Michel Houellebecq, and Paul Auster. He bemoans Vietnam’s “chaotic reading culture in which people rush to read worthless books while ignoring worthwhile ones.” Dung is also critical of the 50-plus state-owned publishers in Vietnam, as published novels “lack high-quality content and have been sloppily edited” and censorship has led to many books being withdrawn from circulation after publication.Thanh Nien News
Transitions Bookstore Closes
After 19 years, Transitions Bookstore & Cafe in Chicago has shut its doors. Owners Gayle Seminara-Mandel and Howard Mandel told the Chicago Tribune that they decided to close because they could no longer pay rent and meet payroll. “The readers went away,” Seminara-Mandel said, as more and more customers came for the free WiFi and fewer for the books.Chicago Tribune