Oops, we censored your reprints!

Reprinting material is hardly a new thing. It's done all the time for publishers to re-cash in on those successful story. Something which is 100% acceptable. After all: consumer gets a copy, publishers and authors get the money. Fair trade and all that. That's what Harlequin said that they were doing after all.

The assignment: Go through our publication list (from Day One!) and look at the accompanying covers. Choose six books and reprint them, EXACTLY AS THEY WERE THEN, as a small collection to celebrate our sixty years in business.

What is the problem? Let's scroll further down the page, shall we?

Now for the books: Remember, our intention was to publish the stories in their original form. But once we immersed ourselves in the text, our eyes grew wide. Our jaws dropped. Social behavior—such as hitting a woman—that would be considered totally unacceptable now was quite common sixty years ago. Scenes of near rape would not sit well with a contemporary audience, we were quite convinced. We therefore decided to make small adjustments to the text, only in cases where we felt scenes or phrases would be offensive to a 2009 readership. Also, grammar and spelling standards have changed quite a bit in sixty years. But that did entail a text edit, which we had not anticipated. AND, we had to clear those adjustments with the current copyright holders, if we had been able to locate them.

(underlining by me)
It smells of irony, and (sadly) censorship. I believe that in this case, the publisher has no interest in the readers, only in its public image and the money that it could potentially rake in.

Another MusicMonday - The Beatles Never Broke Up

Some time ago I stumbled upon a The Beatles album from a supposedly alternate dimension. While I'm not teh greatest The Beatles fan that ever existed, I appreciate these remixes. As anyone who listened to these songs (and other The Beatles recordings before this) can tell, they are remixed versions of existing The Beatles songs, with added material from post The Beatles albums by the members of the split-up band. After all "All the solo stuff we've done would have been on Beatle records." George Harrison said that in the late 1990s, so it's only fair :P

Feel free to download the album for a listen. Meanwhile preview has been embedded above for your listening pleasure.

MusicMonday Sweet Victory by David Glen Eisley

So, I've achieved my 60,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo, time to celebrate in style!!! I give you Sweet Victory by David Glen Eisley, rendered popular amongst younger generations thanks to Sponge-Bob Square-pants

My experience at the Malta book fair

As I said on my Twitter account, yesterday I went to the Maltese Book Fair. One of my first observations was that there were a bunch of stalls selling almost the same local books. Some were also selling the same foreign books (read "Twilight saga"). I also saw an older book (c. 1991) with a similar premise to Twilight being sold. It's cover redesigned to grab Twilight fans' attention...
Anyway, I just continued to confirm how bad some Maltese book cover designs are. Some of the titles were practically illegible. "Inbid ta' Kuljum" comes to mind as the cover was a group of concentric green and white circles and superimposed on top of them was the book title's title written in the same shade of white as the circles. I don't like to judge a book by it's cover but then again I could hardly tell what book it was thanks to that genius cover design; cudos for creativity - it does grab your attention, but you wouldn't want to squint at it in the poor light that was available. If you don't believe me, look here. On-screen it looks much better.
The activity advertised as starting at seven didn't start at seven, more like 7:15-ish so I wasn't able to make it to even the first half-hour.
I also thought that the shuttle service would be free of charge in attempt to coax people into coming for the Book Fair, and as a service to people who can't walk stretches of distances form the event back to the bus stop. I guess not.
That was the worst of it, now that I've gotten it out of my system, I can focus on the good parts:
I discovered that there's an Italian institute in Valletta. Idiotically enough they had a Dylan Dog poster but didn't have anything of Dylan Dog at the stand, but I'm hopeful there would be at the actual institute itself.
I got 3 books:

• The Doctor Who Storybook 2008 for 2euros
• Angel - city of A novelization for the first episode in the Angel: The Series series (makes me dizzy saying that) for 1euro (second hand, so I'm recycling! :{) )
• Soul of the Fire (Sword of Truth, Book 5) this hard-cover bad-boy cost me just 2euros! (another second hand book)
• All in all, the total was 5euros (and I helped the environment by refusing bags given to me [/smugness])
  

I also met an old man on the bus stop who shared some stories with me about his failed publishings. I don't remember most of the details, but we did end up agreeing that the market is unfortunately limited.
Finally, I discovered just why there were certain local books on an extreme sale. PEG Ltd. declared bankruptcy just around three weeks ago

Music Monday - JT Bruce

Welcome to another instalment of Music Monday.
Today we're going to be talking about JT Bruce. So far, he is my most favourite artist on Jamendo, since it's no secret that I like guitars, especially electric ones. Upon visiting the page, you will immediately notice that he only has three albums. Hopefully this will encourage you to listen to all of them.
If I had to pick only one album for you to sample, I'd pick The Dreamer's Paradox since I consider this Bruce's best work to date (of those on the website so far).