By Siobhan O’Leary Swedish crime novelist Liza Marklund recently found herself in the midst of a controversy in the German publishing world when she spoke out against Germany’s fixed book price law and questioned the significance of small booksellers in an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. German booksellers (particularly the smaller ones, who were most directly affronted by the author’s …
Sweden’s Bonnier Produces Slick Digital Mag Concept
By Siobhan O’Leary Sweden’s Bonnier Publishing Group, which owns German publishers arsEdition, Carlsen, Piper, Thienemann and Ullstein, has teamed up with British design firm Berg to develop the digital magazine concept Mag+, reports the Boersenblatt. Like many of its American counterparts, who announced over the past month a variety of digital magazine concepts designed for Tablet computers, Bonnier’s project is also …
Survey Says: Only 13% Willing to Pay for Online Content
By Siobhan O’Leary and Ed Nawotka On average, just 13% of Internet users are ready to pay for information online, according to an international study released by GfK Custom Research on behalf of the Wall Street Journal Europe. The study was conducted in 16 European countries and in the USA with varying results, according to buchreport. In Germany, 9% of …
Global Trade Talk: Sweden’s Publit Aims for POD; Interview with Tin Drum Translator; Danish Retailer Won’t Stock Symbol
By Hannah Johnson Is this the birth of a booming Swedish e-book market? The epub blog reported that a Swedish company called Publit has challenged itself with making all of Sweden’s out-of-print books (or böker, the Swedish word for books) available to readers using Print on Demand. “Considering that 95% of all Swedish books ever in existence are now out …
Global Trade Talk: Borders Offers Six Ereaders, Göteborg Book Fair Concludes
By Hannah Johnson The Bookseller reported yesterday that Borders now carries six different ereading devices in its stores: the Cool-Er eReader for £189.00, Bebook Ereader for £199.00, Bebook Mini Ereader for £179.00, Sony Touch Ereader for £249.99, and Sony Pocket Ereader for £179.99. The Göteborg Book Fair in Sweden took place over the weekend (24 to 27 September) and the …
The Summer of Stieg: How Larsson Conquered Spain and Latin America
By Adriana V. Lopez MADRID: This past June, I boarded a plane at Madrid’s Barajas Airport bound for Bogotá, Colombia when I noticed several women on the plane with the same book. When you’ve worked in publishing, and by serendipity spot more than one person reading the same book in a public setting, and in one condensed space, it can …
Bonus Material: Salinger’s Swedish Nemesis
By Edward Nawotka The saga of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, a purported sequel to J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, written by Swede Frederick Colting – using the pseudonym J.D. California – has now reached the courts, where things are bound to get even goofier. It seems to me that this is a bit …
The Woman Who Fought Back
STOCKHOLM: “This will not come to any resolution. There´s too much at stake. All I can do is to write my book about it,” says Eva Gabrielsson, the long time partner of the late bestselling author Stieg Larsson. Gabrielsson’s memoir, tentatively called The Year After Stieg, is likely to generate a great deal of publicity, so much so that Gabrielsson …