Inshallah

Donald Boström, author of the Aftonbladet article that alleged IDF organ theft, is currently seeking a Swedish-English translator for his book Inshallah (which contains similar allegations), via his publisher Ordfront.  It's to be hoped that translators  who are approached in this way will register a strong protest with Ordfront about the book and its contents.

ePub in Sweden

The Swedish print-on-demand company Publit has set itself the task of making all Swedish out-of-print books available as PoD (print on demand) titles. The ePub blog has a post about a visit to Stockholm by one of their members. Excerpt:

During my time in Sweden we discussed the many different areas of the eBook world, including DRM (of course), the processes involved in going from scanned document (TIFF/PDF/DOC) to an eBook Master format and onto ePub creation itself.

Now, the people at Publit are a group of very talented individuals with plenty of technical knowledge, yet there were aspects of ePub which has left them somewhat perplexed. There were two main points which I found interesting and have heard before around the web so I thought I would share them here.

Can't pay, won't pay

A sad story in Sweden's Dagens Nyheter about a Swedish literary agent who is alleged to have withheld years of royalty payments to international publishers and authors, and now has 500 contracts to back process. The authors involved have included well-known names like Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster, though apparently they have now been paid. It seems to be the first time that anything of this kind has happened in the Swedish publishing world, and no one is quite sure how to deal with it.