Standing Here

Gösta Ågren

My translation of  the first part of Gösta Ågren's autobiographical trilogy, Jär, is now available as a Kindle e-book, Standing Here, published on Amazon's KDP. 

My short introductory essay on the trilogy, published in Books from Finland magazine in 1992, can be read here. 

Bestsellers

Nordic Bookblog has a list of the Top 20 Bestselling Scandinavian Books at Amazon US.

As the NB post points out, the list is a somewhat idiosyncratic one, with notable and questionable omissions. There are also problems of geography (where is Scandinavia?). And there's an interesting feature:

to the extent the list can be assumed to tell anything – old Nordic sagas and writers like especially Sigrid Undset, but also Rolvaag, Hamsun and Ibsen seem to be selling quite well in the US.

Heavyweights join opposition to Google Book Settlement

The Google Book Settlement will go before a U.S. district court on October 7 this year, and Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo! have all announced that they will join efforts to block the Book Rights Registry. The Register reports that

Amazon's Jeff Bezos is on record as saying about the proposed deal: "Clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited... it doesn't seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights."

The battle lines are clear. Authors see the Registry as a way to gain even a meager amount of cash from their work, and Google's competitors see the settlement as cementing an intellectual Googleopoly.

The European Union is also to hold a hearing September 7, "to gather input on how the deal might affect European authors."

Google to sell ebooks

The New York Times reports that Google is to introduce new technology that will make it possible for publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers, thus effectively bypassing Amazon. According to the report, the ebooks will be available in several formats, and will not be targeted specifically at the Kindle device. One major factor in the move is pricing - under the Google scheme, publishers will be allowed to set their own prices, something that does not happen presently with Amazon's Kindle-based ebook marketing.