Catcher in the Rye II?
Fresh from receiving the hallowed accolade of induction into the Bookmarking Book Covers Hall of Fame, J.D. Salinger’s immortal Catcher in the Rye is in the headlines again. In slightly more momentous news, Salinger has sued an anonymous first-time novelist whose book 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye allegedly features a 76-year-old Holden Caulfield who escapes from a nursing home and again wanders through Manhattan, presumably in search of a better book title.
The Smoking Gun has obtained parts of Salinger’s 11-page legal action vs. “John Doe, writing under the name John David California,” and it makes for some fascinating reading. The copyright infringement complaint versus the “unauthorized sequel” even features several pages of plot summary and analysis of Salinger’s novel in addition to a description of its “extraordinary critical praise.”
In describing its “extraordinary commercial success,” the legal brief notes that, “As of May 29, 2009 — 58 years after its publication — The Catcher in the Rye currently sells more copies on Amazon.com than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The DaVinci Code, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Of Mice and Men.” It also notes Holden Caulfield’s status as a “cultural icon” to whom other literary and pop-culture figures have been compared for almost 60 years.
In another interesting nugget, the brief describes the efforts of “numerous filmmakers — including Harvey Weinstein and Steven Spielberg” to purchase film rights to Salinger’s novel. The author has always refused to authorize any work derivative of The Catcher in the Rye, and he is quoted as saying, “There’s no more to Holden Caulfield. Read the book again. It’s all there. Holden Caulfield is only a frozen moment in time.”
The brief concludes, “Salinger’s copyright in The Catcher in the Rye is worth an enormous amount of money and his right of first publication of a sequel is likewise of great monetary value. His right not to publish a sequel is unquantifiable.”
The Guardian UK’s Oliver Marre helpfully speculates here on a number of other sequels to classics that would be best left alone, and this excellent piece from the same paper’s Stuart Evers describes the project’s ridiculousness thusly: “Its gum-tighteningly awful title can only hint at the disaster lurking within.”
Book Vending Machines
A recent NPR story described yet another revolution in the publishing industry that could change the way we purchase and read books.
The Espresso Book Machine is “essentially an ATM for books that automatically prints, binds, and trims, on demand at point of sale, perfect-bound, library-quality paperback books.” About a hundred pages can be printed per minute (meaning it will take about a quarter of an hour to churn out that copy of War and Peace I’ve been meaning to scan on my next coffee break).
The manufacturer claims books will cost about a penny a page and,
“Ultimately, the EBM will make it possible to distribute virtually every book ever published, in any language, anywhere on earth, as easily, quickly, and cheaply as e-mail.”
Other revolutionary claims for the “EBM” see it replacing the traditionally centralized supply chain for book distribution with its “direct-to-consumer retail model.” Over two million public domain and in-copyright titles are currently available at the fifteen or so current vending machine locations in bookshops, libraries, and universities around the world. The manufacturer sees the devices eventually costing about as much as a traditional copy machine.
This statement from the company’s founder discusses his view of “the end of the Gutenberg era” and the revolutionary new publishing infrastructure offered by devices like E-Books and the EBM.
This spec sheet gives more interesting details of the machine itself, with the impressive claim that the EBM “makes it possible to distribute virtually every book ever published, in any language, anywhere on earth, as easily, quickly, and cheaply as e-mail.”
This CNN video shows the machine at work at a London bookshop, with the store manager describing how the revolutionary device all the sudden makes his shop “ten times bigger.”
