Bibliofile

His Way

Sachin Tendulkar had to duck many fans at a book-signing event at Canary Wharf, London. There were people queuing up from 7 am to meet him and get their copies signed. Waterstones sold out all copies of Playing it My Way much before Sachin arrived. Here, the book has sold over two lakh copies, say publishers Hachette. Now, they are in talks with regional publishers for Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Telugu, Bengali and Assamese editions of the book by next summer. Nob­ody beats Sachin in the numbers game.

Writers’ Bloc

Amazon and Andrew Wiley—arguably the world’s top literary agent who has Rushdie, Naipaul and Pamuk among his clients—are not on the same page. Wiley called Amazon ‘an ISIS-like distribution channel’ and exhorted other publishers ‘not to blink’ while doing royalty deals with the e-ret­ailer. “The publishing industry...has cowe­red...and groaned and given Amazon pretty much everything they want,” he recen­tly said. Wiley feels if they stood up to the ‘digital tru­c­king company’, publishers will be able to raise author’s digital royalty by up to 50 per cent. Is there a lesson here for Indian publishers?

Tallest Gall

Vishal Bhardwaj’s three Shakespeare films’ scripts—Maqbool, Omkara and Haider—are out as books (HarperColl­ins). If you missed out on the ‘chutzpah’ joke in Haider, here it is. “Haider: A boy was arrested for murdering his parents. In the courtroom he sought a lenient sentence. Bewildered, the judge asked him, ‘how do you expect mercy, you’ve killed your parents?’ The boy said, ‘My lord, I am an orphan now’.”