Early Friday morning, a reader dropped this comment in a thread about ghostwriting:
Second, I don’t know how concerned the publishing industry really is about the sanctity of authorship. There are new Jason Bourne and Hitchhiker’s Guide books coming out and the original authors are dead.
I honestly wasn’t surprised to hear that these authors and their works were being recycled by their respective estates. Whatever loyalty an author’s relatives or heirs might have to the author’s original material, and whatever reverence they might have for an author’s original voice, it’s awfully hard to leave a vein of gold in the ground. And particularly so if the person you might be insulting is already dead. [ Read more ]