Reissue! Repackage! Re-evaluate the words!

On the Book Standard website, Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin looks at one of the fond traditions of the holiday season — publishers trying to sell us things we already have.

She’s referring to new deluxe editions of everything from the many Da Vinci Code configurations (“its newest incarnations are box-set, collector’s and movie tie-in editions”) to the multi-volume The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (which “scream[s] CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR SOMEONE WHOSE TASTES YOU HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT”) to the new Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And DC Comics is getting in on the act, too, with its “Absolute” versions of classic graphica like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

Crispin’s irritation is understandable, but it’s worth noting that if anything the book business has been slow to capitalize on the whole deluxe-version scheme. Consider all the movies that come out in one “special edition DVD” after another, or the fact that lately Quillblog can’t turn around without bumping into some rerelease of a favourite record, complete with a “bonus disc” of outtakes, demos, etc.

Related links:
Click here for Jessa Crispin’s Book Standard column

Book deal first, puberty later

The Observer has a story about an 11-year-old girl from China who scored a book deal with HarperCollins U.S.

“[Nancy Yi Fan] has since been hailed as a prodigy by her editors who will use her book in a new attempt to establish the firm in China,” The Observer reports. “Her story, Swordbird, is an epic allegory about the struggle for peace and will be printed in [the U.S.] in the new year. Those who have seen it talk about it as the product of a mind as imaginative as some of the greatest names in children’s writing.”

The most remarkable thing about this story is the fact that she apparently got the deal by e-mailing the editor at HarperCollins her unsolicited manuscript. Miracles do happen.

We can only assume that editors at major publishers are preparing for a fresh onslaught of emails claiming the attached manuscript will be “bigger than the Bible and The Da Vinci Code put together!!!!!!!!”

Related links:
Read The Observer story here

The eBook tease continues

CNET News’s Gagdet Blog reported yesterday that Sony has shuffled the release date of its PRS-500 eBook reader back yet another season. Once promised for spring, then summer of this year, an e-mail update from the company is now promising that eBook fans can get their hot little hands on it sometime this autumn.

According to the blog posting, “The e-mail attempts to lure fans with a peek at sample titles that will be available upon the PRS-500′s release, such as The Da Vinci Code, Freakonomics and others hanging out in the top 25 of The New York Times best-seller lists. Of course, if you’ve already polished off these titles, Sony promises 10,000 more eventually, with 15 categories and 100 subcategories.”

That Sony: they’re doing more bait-and-switch than a prom date.

Related links:
Read the CNET News story here

Hating The Da Vinci Code, the sequel

In Other Media is not a fan of The New Yorker‘s funnyman film critic, Anthony Lane, clinging as we do to the idealistic belief that a review should be something more than a preening display of the reviewer’s own cleverness and wit. But Lane’s review of the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code is still worth a look for a couple of reasons. One is that he appears to have hated the film so intensely that actual anger flashes here and there amid the glib quips.

The other reason is that Lane also finds time to attack Dan Brown’s source novel (not to mention its readers, whom he calls “lemmings”) with some barbs that actually hit home. He writes: “Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers — nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.)”

Related links:
Click here for Anthony Lane’s Da Vinci Code review

Movie critics unite with book critics to hate The Da Vinci Code

In Other Media would be remiss if it didn’t comment on the release of the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. By almost all accounts, it stinks out loud. Dana Stevens at Slate sums it up: “As I slogged through the vast wastes of expository dialogue that comprise Dan Brown’s best seller The Da Vinci Code, one of the few compliments I could honestly pay the book was that it was eminently filmable,” she writes. “So much for that theory…. Given the silliness of the source material, The Da Vinci Code stood little chance of being a great film, but it could easily have been a fun one. Instead, Howard takes a strangely respectful approach to the overheated mysticism of the novel, turning the film into that most boring of genres: the pious blockbuster.”

Related links:
Click here for the Slate review

Mr. Mock-turtleneck and Blazer gets in trouble again

The world just can’t seem to leave its wealthiest conspiracy theorist alone. The latest incident in the Da Vinci Code money grab sees Mikhail Anikin, a Russian art historian, vying for a public apology and a slice of the Brown pie as compensation for Dan Brown’s alleged use of at least two of his theories in The Da Vinci Code. The theories in question hold that Leonardo Da Vinci was both a painter and a theologian and that his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is not a portrait so much as an encoded theological message on the state of the Christian Church that combines the images of both Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Anikin told the Agence France-Press that he shared these theories with colleagues in Texas, one of whom asked if he could impart the information to “a detective book author that he knew.” Anikin says he granted permission on the condition that the theory be attributed to him if used in one of the author’s books.

Anikin is threatening Brown with a lawsuit if compensation and an apology are not promised within the next couple of days. Keep up to date on the news with In Other Media, who finds that a happy side effect of all these lawsuits is that she can intelligently discuss DVC at cocktail parties, despite never having read the book.

Related links:
Click here for the story on the Book Standard website
Click here for the report on CBC.ca

Free Dan Brown!

Sweet justice! A London court has ruled, in not so many words, that Dan Brown and Random House are free to continue making grillions of dollars off The Da Vinci Code. Also, the release of the movie won’t be delayed, so Ron Howard can sleep easily tonight, although In Other Media has a feeling that he sleeps easily most nights. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times filed her report from London earlier this morning: “In issuing his judgment, Justice Peter Smith said that Mr. Brown did indeed rely on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in writing a section of the book, but he said that Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the two authors of earlier book, had failed to prove what the central theme of their book was and thus failed to prove that Mr. Brown had lifted it from them. In fact, the judge said, the earlier book ‘does not have a central theme as contended by the claimants: it was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from The Da Vinci Code.‘”

Related links:
Click here for the New York Times article

Da Vinci Code trial wraps up

Hearings for the Dan Brown copyright infringement case wrapped up yesterday, and Sarah Lyall of The New York Times, for her part, thinks she knows who will win. Brown’s publisher, Random House, is being sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of three authors of a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a book whose premise — that Christ married Mary Magdalene and that descendants of their offspring live in France, where a secret society aims to return the western world to theocracy — resembles that of The Da Vinci Code.

In closing statements issued last week, the claimants’ lawyer lamented the fact that Brown’s primary researcher, his wife Blythe, neither took the stand nor issued a statement for the trial. The defendants claim that copyright law does not protect ideas and that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was consulted by Brown late in the writing process and was thus, contrary to Baigent and Leigh’s claim, not instrumental in forming his book’s “architecture.” Although the verdict will be made in the coming weeks, the Times‘ Lyall has divined the outcome of the proceedings by the sets of questions the judge posed to each side. “His tough questions appeared to reflect skepticism, even exasperation, toward some of the arguments put forward by the lawyer for the plaintiffs,” she wrote in this morning’s Times. “During the start of closing arguments last week, Justice Jones asked similarly pointed questions of the lawyer for Random House U.K., Mr. Brown’s publisher and the defendant in the case. But the questions were less frequent and less adversarial, suggesting that Random House’s lawyers have had an easier time making their case.”

And in case you just can’t get enough of the trial, check out additional links below.

Related links:
Click here for Sarah Lyall’s story in The New York Times
Click here for coverage from The Book Standard
Click here for coverage from the CBC

Da Vinci Code on trial — again

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown took to the stand yesterday as the star defence witness in a copyright infringement lawsuit being launched against his publisher, Random House. The claimants this time around are Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, two of the three authors of a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which hypothesized that Jesus Christ survived crucifixion and went on to father children with Mary Magdalene and that a secret society in France is currently involved in attempting to reinstate Christ’s descendants into political power.

That Brown was aware of the book is doubtless: Brown’s tattered and heavily marked copy of the book was submitted as court evidence; the author even named a character Leigh Teabing, an anagram of the claimants’ last names. Yet according to an article on the Times Online, because they’re suing to compensate for lost revenue, Baigent and Leigh’s lawsuit is unlikely to win them much, even if they prevail. On the first day of the case, Amazon sales for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail shot up 3500%. (On Tuesday afternoon, the book was the 18th best-seller on Amazon.com.)

And if Baigent and Leigh do win, it might change the nature of copyright law as we know it. The authors are not contesting individual passages of Brown’s book so much as its entire premise. “The legal maxim that ‘there is no copyright in an idea’ is being tested,” writes Alex Wade of the Times, “just as, in televisual media, there have been successive attempts to claim format rights in reality television shows.” When one considers the extent to which writers reinterpret, recontextualize, and otherwise borrow the material of other writers, a successful lawsuit could mean much in the world of books.

An interesting result of this whole mess is that those intrigued by biographical details can now learn a lot about Brown: his writing process, the fact that his wife researches most of his books, that they used to sell books from the back of their car, and that one point in Brown’s career ebb saw him write and sell a story under the pseudonym Danielle Brown called “187 Men to Avoid.”

Related links:
Click here for the Times story
Click here for the Book Standard’s take on events
Click here for trial coverage from The New York Times
Click here for a story on The Guardian website

What’s in a name? About a 35.9% chance of hitting it big

Coming up with a title for a novel is always tricky — so many factors to consider, so many people to please. If only there were a simple and quantitative way to gauge the effectiveness of a proposed title. Well, now there is!

Check out the “Lulu Titlescorer,” which makes this bold claim: “Now, for the first time in literary history, you can put your title to the scientific test and find out whether it has what it takes for bestseller success.” And how did the good folks at Lulu discover this Holy Grail? “We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.”

Now, here at In Other Media we pride ourselves on our sense of humour, but it’s unclear how seriously we’re meant to take this (even if we can all agree on how seriously we should take it). But in any case, Lulu itself appears to be an ambitious and for-real POD/self-publishing platform; the Titlescorer is merely a value-added adjunct.

Try it yourself: just enter your proposed title, along with a few supporting facts, and the grand machine will tell you how likely the book is to hit #1 on the bestseller lists. Take it with a grain of salt, though; In Other Media entered “The Da Vinci Code” and learned that it “has a 35.9% chance of being a bestselling title.”

Related links:
Click here for the Lulu Titlescorer